New subject: Does anyone have an Altos CPM/MPM machine available?

15 Jun 2005

...
 >DEC through the 'golden age' didn't go
after that market. They tried  to
...
  target
scientific rather than corporate computing. 
One of the oddities is that the 36bit machines the 10s/20s were well
known for their timesharing with huge nubers of users. 
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.

PDP-8s and -10s