Talked to a friend of mine who spent a lot of time on PDP-8s at the time, and basically it seems like I was full of shit, and TOPS-10 really was the origin of all this stuff. More details to come.
My friend John Cowan (also known by his hacker name "John Cowan") explains:
Most basic PDP-8 software was written on '10s using a cross assembler, including the various compilers and interpreters meant for PDP-8 users (Basic, Focal, Fortran II and IV), and OS/8 was made to look much like TOPS-10 externally, though they had nothing in common internally. A line can be traced from TOPS-10 to OS/8 to RT-11 to CP/M to DOS to Windows command lines.
There were some nice features I still miss in OS/8, like the COMPILE command, which would accept a number of source files, figure out from their extensions what language they were, and run the appropriate toolchain (it was normal for each language to have its own assembler and loader).
So basically I was full of shit and TOPS-10 really is the origin. Thanks for the correction, John!
