tops-20 documentation

[Brian Makin]

I'm most interested in tops-20 so I'm starting to dig.
I see a bit of documentation but not much.

Is anyone working on any? Be happy to collab if so.

[Clem Cole]

The Place to start is with the Stanford LOTS Manual since the Version of TOPS-20 you have is bases on LOTS: 

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/stanford/lots/LOTS_DECSYSTEM-20_Overview_Rev9_Sep84.pdf

The entire DEC Doc can be found: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS20/

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[Brian Makin]

I see a bunch of stuff about the panda distribution...
Can you give any context as to the relation?

On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 10:00 AM Clem Cole <cl...@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>
> The Place to start is with the Stanford LOTS Manual since the Version of TOPS-20 you have is bases on LOTS:
> https://bitsavers.org/pdf/stanford/lots/LOTS_DECSYSTEM-20_Overview_Rev9_Sep84.pdf
>
> The entire DEC Doc can be found: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS20/

[Clem Cole]

The Panda distribution was the Late Mark Crispen's packaging of Twenex which was based on LOTS,  plus a number of other things he found interesting, including a nascent UNIX/C support.  Note that the Pascal is not the DEC Pascal in his distrubution but used to be in their documentation but rather the version that started on the PDP-10's in Europe and was modified by many, with I believe Stanford, CMU, and Rutgers being some of the last that laid hands on it.  This is importance because the I/O interface that DEC Pascal describes in the docs you will find will not work.  I mentioned to them that error a while, but and I think they fixed that, but I have not looked.

May I suggest before you try running Panda yourself.  Get a free account on the SDF Tops-20 Machines [http://twenex.org/ ] and learn how to use it.  It's also based on Panda, there are a few difference because its running in slightly different HW but you will not have to administer it as you learn to use LOTS/TOPS-20 a.k.a. Twenex  

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[Stephen Jones]

Thank you for the suggestion Cole!  To avoid confusion twenex.org was on Panda from 2002 until 2021 when we

acquired a Toad-2.  We are currently running XKL's TOPS-20 however we did incorporate much of what LOTS

and Panda was about with the exception of Monitor changes and Panda EXEC Command processor 7.1(4453)-4

which is not the default EXEC.  You can run Panda EXEC by just typing 'PEXEC' once you're logged in.

We also have an SC40 running Systems Concepts version of TOPS-20.

Detail of both machines can be seen at:

https://twenex.org/darkstar

https://twenex.org/sc40

User contributed help can be found here: https://wiki.twenex.org/

https://twenex.org/starter.html

and of course 'help commands' on the system itself.

These hosts are provided by the SDF Vintage Systems program and are part of the Interim Computer Museum.

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