"tenex", where does the word come from?

[Kronen Insultants]

In article <623 at sdcc12.UUCP> wa371 at sdcc12.UUCP (Bernd Riechelmann) writes:
>Recently learned about the tcsh shell, and the documentation says that 
>it is 'tenex' like.  I can not find tenex in the dictionary.
>Where does it come from and/or what does it mean?

>Bernd

"TENEX" was an operating system designed and implemented by Daniel
Murphy and others at BBN (Bolt, Baranek, and Newman) in the early
1970's based on TOPS-10.  It ran on a DECsystem-10 with special paging
hardware added by BBN.  DEC, as the story goes, bought the rights to
TENEX and used it as a base for TOPS-20 ("Twenex").  

A shell that is "tenex-like" would probably include some of the following
characteristics:  
	1.  <ESC> completion of filenames and commands
	2.  <ESC> to find out more information about a command (defaults, etc.)
	3.  Typing a question mark at any time will cause the EXEC to list the
	    options at that point (e.g. typing "CO?" at the EXEC prompt will 
	    cause the exec to list all the commands that begin with "CO")
    	4.  Typing a question mark after a command will cause the EXEC to
	    list the available options and/or what type of argument is expected

TENEX was written entirely in assembly language (the norm for that time, but
still terrible to contemplate -- if you hadn't guessed, I only use assembler
when absolutely necessary :-)).

An article describing TENEX appears in "Communications of the ACM" in one of
the 1972 issues.  The article is by Murphy and the other implementors.


						Chet Ramey


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