Find information on thousands of medical conditions and prescription drugs.

Tenex

The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC was the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10. It was preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (at least by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek and Newman's TENEX operating system, using special paging hardware. The system is entirely unrelated to the similarily-named TOPS-10. more...

Home

Tacrine

Tagamet

Talwin

Tamiflu

Tao

Tarka

Taurine

Taxol

Tazorac

Temodar

Tenex

Tenuate

Theo-24

Theobid

Tiazac

Tikosyn

Timolol

Topamax

Tora

Toradol

Trental

Trest

Tretinoin

Triacetin

Triad

Triamcinolone

Triamcinolone hexacetonide

Tricor

Trimox

Tritec

Tubocurarine chloride

Tussionex

Tylenol

Tyrosine

TENEX

In the 1960's BBN was involved in a number of LISP-based artificial intelligence projects for DARPA, many of which had very large (for the era) memory requirements. One solution to this problem was to add paging software to the LISP language, allowing to write out unused portions of memory to disk for later recall if needed. One such system had been developed for the PDP-1 at MIT by Dan Murphy before he joined BBN. Early DEC machines were based on an 18-bit word, allowing addresses to encode for a 262kword memory. The machines were based on expensive core memory and included nowhere near the required amount. The pager used the otherwise unused bits of the address to store a key into a table of blocks on a magnetic drum that acted as the pager's backing store, and the software would fetch the pages if needed and then re-write the address to point to the proper area of RAM.

In 1964 DEC announced the PDP-6. DEC was still heavily involved with MIT's AI Lab, and many feature requests from the LISP hackers were moved into this machine. BBN became interested in buying one for their AI work when they became available, but wanted DEC to add a hardware version of Murphy's pager directly into the system. With such an addition, every program on the system would have paging support invisibly, making it much easier to do any sort of programming on the machine. DEC was initially interested, but soon (1966) announced they were in fact dropping the PDP-6 and concentrating solely on their smaller 18-bit and new 16-bit lines. The PDP-6 was expensive and complex, and had not sold well for these reasons.

It wasn't long until it became clear that DEC was once again entering the 36-bit business with what would become the PDP-10. BBN started talks with DEC to get a paging subsystem in the new machine, then known by its CPU name, the KA-10. DEC was not terribly interested. One development of these talks was the inclusion of two dual memory areas, allowing all programs to be divided into a protected (exec in DEC-speak) and user side. Additionally, DEC was firm on keeping the cost of the machine as low as possible, including only 16k words of core and placing registers in RAM, resulting in a considerable performance hit.

BBN nevertheless went ahead with its purchase of several PDP-10s, and decided to build their own hardware pager. During this period a debate began on what operating system to run on the new machines. Strong arguments were made for the continued use of TOPS-10, in order to keep their existing software running with minimum effort. This would require a re-write of TOPS to support the paging system, and this seemed like a major problem. At the same time, TOPS did not support a number of features the developers wanted. In the end they decided to make a new system, but include an emulation library that would allow it to run existing TOPS-10 software with minor effort.

Read more at Wikipedia.org

• [List your site here Free!]

Industry Consolidations Keep Rolling - Future Electronics to acquire the electronic component distribution business of Advent Electronics; Bell Micro to
From Electronic News, 10/12/98 by Bernard Levine

Future acquiring Advent; Bell Micro to buy Tenex

More distribution industry consolidations surfaced last week, with Future Electronics and Bell Microproducts reporting separate deals to acquire companies.

Future has agreed to acquire the electronic component distribution business of Midwest regional Advent Electronics Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Bell Micro has signed a letter of intent to purchase the assets of Toronto-based computer products distributor Tenex Data, a division of Axidata Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Abitibi-Consolidated, Inc., a leading marketer and manufacturer of communications papers.

Advent Electronics Inc., with corporate offices in Des Plaines, Ill., is a broadline regional distributor with offices in Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin and Missouri, in addition to sales offices in New Jersey and Florida. Advent Electronics will retain its name, staff and operating divisions. Warehousing, inventory and common administrative functions will be assumed by Future Electronics' U.S. corporate headquarters located in Bolton, Mass.

Victor Blair will continue to have responsibility for the day-to-day operations of Advent Electronics, Future said.

"Both companies look forward to providing their customers with state-of-the-art supply line management, engineering support for an outstanding array of component suppliers and the most reliable service in the industry," it was said.

Meanwhile, in the Bell Micro deal, Tenex Data is described as a leading Canadian computer products distributor especially focused on the mass storage components and systems market. The division distributes disk, tape and optical drives in addition to other data storage subsystems including RAID and tape library products.

Tenex's headquarters are located in Toronto with additional locations in Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver. Tenex reported $35 million U.S. in revenues in 1997. Major Tenex product lines include Seagate, Western Digital, ADIC and Digital Equipment Storageworks.

"In its role as the only major Canadian distributor that specializes in storage products, Tenex Data has a strong presence with the reseller and integrator markets," said Don Bell, president and CEO of Bell Microproducts. "We intend to continue Tenex's successful strategy of differentiation through offering technical expertise and other value-added services to resellers. Tenex Data and Bell Micro have similar strategies and our product lines are complementary. Several of our major supplier partners are shared by both companies."

Mr. Bell continued, "Bell Microproducts and Tenex together offer the industry's most complete line of mass storage components and subsystems, as well as value added services. This concentration on data storage products is unique and complementary. We believe this combination will offer significant benefits to our customers, supplier partners and employees. Tenex will bring a valued customer base to our company and will offer, among other products, our BellStor proprietary line of memory products to its Canadian customers. We are pleased to enter the Canadian market with such a prestigious organization," he said.

The acquisition is subject to final negotiation of the definitive agreements and satisfactory completion of due diligence.

Return to Tenex

Home

Contact

Resources

Exchange Links

ebay