TOPS-10
More info
- Creator
- Digital Equipment Corporation
- Released
- 1967
- Type
- Operating system
- Platform
- PDP-10
The PDP-10 operating system where a large part of hacker culture and the early network protocols actually came into being.
DEC's time-sharing system for the PDP-10, originally just called Monitor. It let dozens of users share one machine simultaneously over terminals, a precondition for the interactive computing later taken for granted. The machines sat at MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and were among the first nodes on ARPANET.
The environment shaped a generation: much of the Jargon File's vocabulary, early versions of Emacs and large parts of the LISP work came out of it. DEC developed TOPS-20 in parallel on a different codebase, which thoroughly confused customers. The PDP-10 line was cancelled in 1983, a decision that pushed people towards Unix — and thereby, indirectly, produced both the GNU project and the free software movement.