8 Mar
2006
8 Mar
'06
11:40 a.m.
If we're talking about the same thing, TENEX ran
on a modified
PDP-10.
It was a precursor to TOPS-10 (at least I think it
was).
That's what Ivan & Bert Sutherland said (it was Bert, I think) in a
Computer History Museum video on google I watched the other day.
---
google for "Dan Murphy" and "TENEX" for the history.
Zane will probably pop up about this at some point as well.
TENEX was developed at BBN to develop a more modern operating
system for the original PDP-10 (KA-10) processor. It required
special hardware to support demand paging (the BBN Pager Box)
TOPS-10 was the original PDP-10 operating system.
DEC hired Murphy later to modify TENEX for the third generation
(KL-10) processor. This became TOPS-20.
A couple of other variants of TENEX were developed as well; the
one used on the PARC-devoped MAXC and the Foonly (called FOONEX)
Docs for the BBN pager are scanned under bbn on bitsavers.