XKL TOAD (was: Re: How to tell differential scsi drives and cards apart)

From: John Floren Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 12:32 PM [snip] I *think* the Systems Concepts SC-25 fit into a BA-23 style cabinet, but I never saw one. (My only experience with SC boxen was the SC-30M at Stanford LOTS, which was a 5ft tall 30in square cabinet.) If that's true, it might have been epsilon smaller than the Toad-1. We built fewer than 20. A dozen were used in-house as a platform for the next product, which went through several years of iterating into what you now find on the XKL web site. (They may still be in use, but I haven't worked for XKL for nearly 6 years and don't know what they're using these days.) Two were sold to MCI/BT Tymnet, to replace their 4 KL-10 systems. These were retired shortly after the turn of the century, and placed into the hands of the gentlemen responsible for their being placed into service at Tymshare. One is still in private hands; the other was scrapped by an operation manager who did not know what he was doing (or perhaps he did). One went to Digital in exchange for a revision of the licensing contract for 36-bit software. It is now in the possession of the Computer History Museum. One was purchased by Paul Allen, and is freely available for public access. Accounts can be requested through the PDP Planet web site, under the Community button. One was given to a well-known collector of PDP-10 equipment who has been a friend to the owner of XKL since the early days of cisco Systems. It included the only copy of the Tops-10 port for the Toad-1. "That is not dead which can sleeping lie, And with strange eons even death may die." (Otherwise, none of us would be doing any of this, whether as a hobby or in a professional context.) Rich Alderson Server Engineer, PDPplanet Project Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com (206) 342-2239 (206) 465-2916 cell