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A few years ago, I met a former DEC guy. I told him the story of how Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 operating system on

A few years ago, I met a former DEC guy. I told him the story of how Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 operating system on its very first routers. Even with the overhead of emulation, Unix of that time simply didn't have what it took to do the job under those hardware constraints. Later, Cisco came clean to DEC. The guy hadn't heard that story, but he did remember that DEC got a really sweet deal on Cisco hardware. A lot of ideas from DEC operating systems are due for resurrection.

kabdib 6y ago
> Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 > operating system on its very first routers AFAIK, TOPS-10 only ran on 36-bit PDP-10 hardware. And the only PDP-10 clones I know of were made by Foonly and some even more obscure companies, all of which folded pretty quickly in the 80s. I can't imagine Cisco doing a PDP-10 clone, or even emulating one. The networking software on TOPS-10 wasn't much to write home about, either.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  The previous post made me want to go digging and ended up finding this gem[0]. Looks like you're both kind of right- Stanford wrote the code for their first routers to run off on top of DEC/TOPS machines, and then the code was lifted from Stanford by Cisco. [0]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2309917/lan-wan-router-man.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2309917/lan-wan-router-...
  - kabdib 6y ago
    That makes a lot more sense; written in relatively portable C instead of the sea of MACRO-10 assembly statements I had imagined. Thanks for the clarification!
- kenny11 6y ago
  But one of the founders of Cisco did end up doing a PDP-10 clone called the TOAD-1 at his next company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKL
ojbyrne 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
blahyawnblah 6y ago
> A lot of ideas from DEC operating systems are due for resurrection. I know a lot of ideas have been incorporated. Which ones that haven't are still worth it?
- rudolfwinestock 6y ago
  Session management is one. In Unix, programs like GNU screen or tmux are needed for that. In most DEC operating systems, it was built into the system. Another feature of the Tenex line of operating systems (and others of that era) was that the command shell also served as a 'system monitor,' like some of the 8-bit computers had. In other words, the CLI was also a rudimentary debugger. An example of this was explained by Gerald Sussman. He told a story of how Marvin Minsky walked a student through making a full-featured program at the command line on an ITS system at the MIT AI Lab (or was it the Media Lab?). Minsky simply made a program that consisted of nothing but the assembly language RETURN statement. Running that program brought the system back to the shell. Minsky then added a few more instructions to that program; not much, but enough to keep it in a working state. Then, Minsky—from the command line—examined the contents of certain registers, and incorporated them into the next few assembly language instructions which he added to the program. At each stage of that loop, Minsky always had a working program. So, from the command line, one could develop an assembly language program in an environment that was more dynamic and responsive than that offered by many modern development environments for modern languages.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    VMS also had automatic file versioning. It was pretty simplistic as I recall, like every time you saved a file, it got a .1, .2, .3, etc added to the file name. I don't recall how many versions it kept.
    - mikewarot 6y ago
      Files-11 was the file system that supported versioning. There was a variable in each directory that specified how many versions of a file to keep. Files were named like login.com;1 login.com;2 etc... where login.com was your login batch file to set prompt, etc.
nickik 6y ago
Suns should really have taken that market. People were using workstations of on routers already. The were perfect positioned to get into it. Scott McNealy called it one of their biggest failures. Their slogan was literally 'The Network is the Computer' but they failed to go into routers.
- rjsw 6y ago
  The original Stanford SUN workstation [1] lead to the first hardware for both Sun Microsystems and Cisco.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    Missed out the link: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUN_workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUN_workstation
blackrock 6y ago
Holy crap! Is this for real? Cisco got its start by pirating a competitor’s operating system? The same thing happened decades later, when Huawei pirated Cisco’s operating system for their own routers, when they first started out. They eventually settled out of court, and Huawei paid up for their malfeasance, so Cisco no longer complains about it, at least not publicly. But the irony here is unreal. Cisco here is claiming to be holier-than-thou, but in actuality, they did the same thing that Huawei did. Also, I heard Huawei travelled into the future, and stole Cisco’s 5G technology. Otherwise, how else could Huawei have come up with their own cutting edge telecommunications technology on their own?
- Hikikomori 6y ago
  Huawei copied the cli syntax, not the OS.

kabdib 6y ago

> Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 > operating system on its very first routers AFAIK, TOPS-10 only ran on 36-bit PDP-10 hardware. And the only PDP-10 clones I know of were made by Foonly and some even more obscure companies, all of which folded pretty quickly in the 80s. I can't imagine Cisco doing a PDP-10 clone, or even emulating one. The networking software on TOPS-10 wasn't much to write home about, either.

mrkstu 6y ago
The previous post made me want to go digging and ended up finding this gem[0]. Looks like you're both kind of right- Stanford wrote the code for their first routers to run off on top of DEC/TOPS machines, and then the code was lifted from Stanford by Cisco. [0]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2309917/lan-wan-router-man.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2309917/lan-wan-router-...
- kabdib 6y ago
  That makes a lot more sense; written in relatively portable C instead of the sea of MACRO-10 assembly statements I had imagined. Thanks for the clarification!
kenny11 6y ago
But one of the founders of Cisco did end up doing a PDP-10 clone called the TOAD-1 at his next company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKL

ojbyrne 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

blahyawnblah 6y ago

> A lot of ideas from DEC operating systems are due for resurrection. I know a lot of ideas have been incorporated. Which ones that haven't are still worth it?

rudolfwinestock 6y ago
Session management is one. In Unix, programs like GNU screen or tmux are needed for that. In most DEC operating systems, it was built into the system. Another feature of the Tenex line of operating systems (and others of that era) was that the command shell also served as a 'system monitor,' like some of the 8-bit computers had. In other words, the CLI was also a rudimentary debugger. An example of this was explained by Gerald Sussman. He told a story of how Marvin Minsky walked a student through making a full-featured program at the command line on an ITS system at the MIT AI Lab (or was it the Media Lab?). Minsky simply made a program that consisted of nothing but the assembly language RETURN statement. Running that program brought the system back to the shell. Minsky then added a few more instructions to that program; not much, but enough to keep it in a working state. Then, Minsky—from the command line—examined the contents of certain registers, and incorporated them into the next few assembly language instructions which he added to the program. At each stage of that loop, Minsky always had a working program. So, from the command line, one could develop an assembly language program in an environment that was more dynamic and responsive than that offered by many modern development environments for modern languages.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  VMS also had automatic file versioning. It was pretty simplistic as I recall, like every time you saved a file, it got a .1, .2, .3, etc added to the file name. I don't recall how many versions it kept.
  - mikewarot 6y ago
    Files-11 was the file system that supported versioning. There was a variable in each directory that specified how many versions of a file to keep. Files were named like login.com;1 login.com;2 etc... where login.com was your login batch file to set prompt, etc.

nickik 6y ago

Suns should really have taken that market. People were using workstations of on routers already. The were perfect positioned to get into it. Scott McNealy called it one of their biggest failures. Their slogan was literally 'The Network is the Computer' but they failed to go into routers.

rjsw 6y ago
The original Stanford SUN workstation [1] lead to the first hardware for both Sun Microsystems and Cisco.
- rjsw 6y ago
  Missed out the link: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUN_workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUN_workstation

blackrock 6y ago

Holy crap! Is this for real? Cisco got its start by pirating a competitor’s operating system? The same thing happened decades later, when Huawei pirated Cisco’s operating system for their own routers, when they first started out. They eventually settled out of court, and Huawei paid up for their malfeasance, so Cisco no longer complains about it, at least not publicly. But the irony here is unreal. Cisco here is claiming to be holier-than-thou, but in actuality, they did the same thing that Huawei did. Also, I heard Huawei travelled into the future, and stole Cisco’s 5G technology. Otherwise, how else could Huawei have come up with their own cutting edge telecommunications technology on their own?

Hikikomori 6y ago
Huawei copied the cli syntax, not the OS.