PDP-8s and -10s

to And they did put effort into front-end terminal concentrators on the later models of those systems. TOPS-10 had a significant influence on the user interfaces of some of DEC's smaller operating systems (RT-11 and RSTS for example), as well as CP/M. Google for discussions on alt.sys.pdp10 for why this wasn't true for RSX and VMS. I suspect that the driving force for tools (esp in TOPS-10) inside DEC came about because much of the software development inside of DEC for other CPU families until they converted to VAXen was done using cross-development tools on their internal timesharing systems (MACY11, etc.) and because 10's were THE machines to have in universities (MIT, CMU, etc, etc) if you wanted something that had a lot of good tools for a moderate amount of money.