"They said, `We can expect the company to
maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong,
but that's what they did."
At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet
another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted.
The system's name itself was a protest. Officially
dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a
commercial operating system DEC marketed for the
PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had deveoped an improved
version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.Multiple sources: see Richard
Stallman interview,
Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0.
http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html
Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says
he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the
TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there
was no way I was going to call it that," Stallman
recalls. "So I decided to insert a `w' in the Tenex
name and call it Twenex."
The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its
own derisive nickname: Oz.
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