TOPS-20

The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. TOPS-20 began in 1969 as the TENEX operating system of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). TOPS-20 is almost entirely unrelated to the similarly named TOPS-10, but it was shipped with the PA1050 TOPS-10 Monitor Calls emulation facility which allowed most, but not all, TOPS-10 executables to run unchanged. As a matter of policy, DEC did not update PA1050 to support later TOPS-10 additions except where required by DEC software. TOPS-20 was preferred by most PDP-10 users over TOPS-10 (at least by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans).