资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

TWENEX
     
         /twe'neks/ The TOPS-20 {operating system}
        by {DEC} - the second proprietary OS for the {PDP-10} -
        preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by
        those who were not {ITS} or {WAITS} partisans).  TOPS-20 began
        in 1969 as {Bolt, Beranek & Newman}'s {TENEX} operating system
        using special paging hardware.  By the early 1970s, almost all
        of the systems on the {ARPANET} ran TENEX.  DEC purchased the
        rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own.
        The first in-house code name for the operating system was
        VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers
        started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC
        could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS.
        When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly
        reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when
        someone objected that "krans" meant "funeral wreath" in
        Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means
        simply "wreath"; this part of the story may be apocryphal).
     
        Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating
        system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed.  The
        hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it
        TWENEX (a contraction of "twenty TENEX"), even though by this
        point very little of the original TENEX code remained
        (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD).
        DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term
        caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation "20x" was
        also used).  TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact,
        there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as
        fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS - but DEC's
        decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX
        architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the
        DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun.
        DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to {VMS},
        but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers
        had migrated to Unix.
     
        [{Jargon File}]
     
        (1995-04-01)