who invented CONFIGSYS 809

Perhaps, and it makes equal sense. However, perhaps not all parts of DEC were on the same page. I know the acronyms for stuff that the engineers came up with at Tandy (where I worked in the '80s and early 90s') usually were not the ones the Merchies and marketing people published for the same product, with the Merchies arguing that their versions were "catchier", but theirs was probably also misleading, deceptive and inaccurate.

I was a system administrator for a DECsystem-20 (#2260, eventually a 2060KLB) for about four years (1978-1981), did all the OS upgrades, tried to keep it safe from flood (flooded building above us and poured down on the equipment), nastier flood (sewer main backed up into data center), bad FSEs (Mr. "Metal Chain"), personally filed perhaps 75+ SPRs during those years (including one that made the CTCO list because I could crash the box as a mortal*), and of course tried to cope with facility management that hated the DEC-20 and wanted nothing better than to have it out of the building, simply because it didn't say IBM on the outside. (This was back in the days of serious absolute blind loyalty to IBM, and a lack of loyalty to IBM was a career person in a shop that IBM had "got to". This was definitely one of those shops.)

*I still have a paper copy of that SPR reply - it was never published by DEC because of the paranoia surrounding how any user could crash TOPS-20.

I know that at one point we encountered the "TOPS - The OPerating System" translation in documents provided by some part of Digital. Today, I only have a few of the DEC-20 manuals and papers (plus a bunch of 9-tracks that are in DECs non-standard 35-36-bit non-ANSI format so nothing else reads them), so I probably can't point you to a specific book or memo. I do think we got the term just before or when we moved to version 4. (As I recall that change was somewhat turbulent.) I can date that, because the phrase got introduced into various support publications we made on campus describing how to use the system, and these documents had to be updated when release 4 came along. Documents prior to release 4 don't seem to include the TOPS translation.

The naming certainly wasn't something just invented in-house (because of the IBM leanings, any in-house version would be highly offensive), and this was long before this facility thought of having a network between anything other than remote IBM printers and card readers, so our contact with other TOPS-x0 shops was limited to what we read in the SPR reports of others (DEC would publish a book of SPRs and their answers once a month or so), and the one or two DECUS meetings that happened to be within 45 miles of our location, the maximum travel allowance we had. I therefore think we probably did not pick up the phrase from another site either.

I would guess the translation was found in one of the marketing glossy publications we would be randomly sent (sometimes a case worth of them at the start of each semester), the ones telling us how this system was so superior and great and would expand and evolve forever.

We got those materials right up until the project Juptier failure and the day the DEC sales droid walked in and told us the DEC20 line was dead and would we like to buy a VAX? Boy did that meeting give the Church-of-IBM people some ammo.

Frank Durda IV - only this address works:One of my favorite TOPS-20 SPRs just You must remove the "LOSE" to mail me. DEC had to admit that they forgot to Copr. 2005, ask before reprinting. pages of summary in the SPR reply.

Notes from my time keeping a DECsystem-20 (and that IBM thing) afloat: