TOPS-20

From: Rob Deker <deker_at_digitaladdiction.com>
Date: Wed Oct 21 09:01:19 1998

On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:

> > tcsh does that. (Love tcsh :-)
>
> tcsh just does filename completion, not command completion and there are
> some areas where it doesn't work. For kicks, try the following:
>
both tcsh and bash will do command completion as well. And some
interesting notes from the tcsh manual page:



THE T IN TCSH
       In 1964, DEC produced the PDP-6. The PDP-10 was a later
       re-implementation. It was re-christened the DECsystem-10
       in 1970 or so when DEC brought out the second model, the
       KI10.

       TENEX was created at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (a Cambridge,
       Mass. think tank) in 1972 as an experiment in demand-paged
       virtual memory operating systems. They built a new pager
       for the DEC PDP-10 and created the OS to go with it. It
       was extremely successful in academia.

       In 1975, DEC brought out a new model of the PDP-10, the
       KL10; they intended to have only a version of TENEX, which
       they had licensed from BBN, for the new box. They called
       their version TOPS-20 (their capitalization is trade-
       marked). A lot of TOPS-10 users (`The OPerating System
       for PDP-10') objected; thus DEC found themselves support-
       ing two incompatible systems on the same hardware--but
       then there were 6 on the PDP-11!

       TENEX, and TOPS-20 to version 3, had command completion
       via a user-code-level subroutine library called ULTCMD.
       With version 3, DEC moved all that capability and more
       into the monitor (`kernel' for you Unix types), accessed
       by the COMND% JSYS (`Jump to SYStem' instruction, the
       supervisor call mechanism [are my IBM roots also show-
       ing?]).
       The creator of tcsh was impressed by this feature and sev-
       eral others of TENEX and TOPS-20, and created a version of
       csh which mimicked them.
Received on Wed Oct 21 1998 - 09:01:19 BST