After refreshing my memory a bit, indeed it was not forked from TOPS-10, but instead had what was essentially a syscall emulation layer for TOPS-10 binaries, something that ended up also present in some other PDP-10 OSes I think
That is what I remember. Basically this allowed it to run binaries built for TOPS-10.
At USC we ran TOPS-10 on the student machines and TENEX, and then later, TOPS-20, in the engineering computer lab. The TOPS-20 migration allowed us to run some accounting package from the student side on the staff side. That helped mitigate some of the impact on response time on the student side which was really poor with a couple hundred students logged in at the same time.
At USC we ran TOPS-10 on the student machines and TENEX, and then later, TOPS-20, in the engineering computer lab. The TOPS-20 migration allowed us to run some accounting package from the student side on the staff side. That helped mitigate some of the impact on response time on the student side which was really poor with a couple hundred students logged in at the same time.