[TUHS] History of top

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> reports on Mon, 28 May 2018 10:31:56 +0000:

>> But apparently the inspiration came from VMS:
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20170527120123/http://www.unixtop.org:80/about.shtml

That link contains the statement

>> The first version of top was completed in the early part of 1984.

However, on TOPS-20, which was developed several years before VMS, but
still from the same corporation, we had the sysdpy utility which
produced a similar display as top does.  

>From my source archives, I find in score/4-utilities/sysdpy.mac the
ending comments:

	;462 -  DON'T DO A RLJFN AFTER A CLOSF IN NEWDPY
	;<4.UTILITIES>SYSDPY.MAC.58,  2-Jun-79 14:15:54, EDIT BY DBELL
	;461 -  START USING STANDARD TOPS-20 EDIT HISTORY CONVENTIONS, AND
	;       REMOVE OLD EDIT HISTORY.
	...
	;COPYRIGHT (C) 1976,1977,1978,1979 BY DIGITAL EQUIPMENT \
         CORPORATION, MAYNARD, MASS.

I therefore expect that there was 460-entry list of log messages that
predated 2-Jun-1979, and likely went back a few years.  Two other
versions of sysdpy.mac in my archives have also dropped log messages
before 461.

Even before TOPS-20, on the CDC 6400 SCOPE operating system, there was
a similar tool (whose name I no longer recall) that gave a
continuously updated display of system-wide process activity. That was
available in at least late 1973.

I suspect that top-like displays were added to most other interactive
operating systems, as soon as screen terminals made updates convenient
without wasting console paper.  One of the first questions likely to
be asked by interactive users is "what is my job doing?".  

In a TOPS-20 terminal window, you could type Ctl-T to get a one-line
status report for the job that was currently running from your
terminal.  For many users, that was preferable to sysdpy, and it was
heavily used.



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