30 Nov
2014
30 Nov
'14
12:03 p.m.
From: Jacob Dahl Pind
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2014 7:26 AM
On the talk of copyright status on TOPS-10/20 on the
hecnet maillist, it
was hinted at tops-20 where used embedded for routers from XKL, running on
reimplemnted pdp10 hardware.
<qoute>
Unfortunately I do not have much details. I was at the Living Computer Museum
and talked with RIch Alderson, who used to work at XKL. And he showed me a
newer generation router from XKL, opened up, at LCM. And they use a PDP-10 on
a chip, and it was actually running TOPS-20, and I could play around at the
EXEC level in there.
</quote>
Findes it somewhat hard to imagine anyone would take
36bit architectur and
build a router around it.
But it does seem posible they really do, I visisted
ftp://xkl.com/pub/download/
tar xvf DarkStar_v3.0.0.tgz
and looking in upgrade-example.txt
I sees things as
System Processor (XKL-2)
2. XMH-1 (256MW), Testing: SDdAa, on line at LPN o0
Reading 0704 pages
0704000 words read in 36 bit mode
..
Its alive! who would have though that
The Toad-2 processors (each router contains a redundant pair)are not the
routing engines in the DarkStar products from XKL. Routing at those speeds
(OC-192, 10G Ethernet, etc.) is handled directly at the connector.
However, when a router is powered up, or when configurations are changed,
it is useful to have a real operating system with well known tools available
to make those operations simpler. This was a felt need as far back as the
SUN boards used on the 3Mbit PUP network created at Stanford before there
as ever a company called cisco Systems (and that was the original spelling).
As the late Mark Crispin was fond of saying, TOPS-20 is a great improvement
on its successors, so the extended PDP-10 architecture of the Toad-1 was
implemented in a Xilinx FPGA, with further extensions to the OS, and the
Toad-2 came into being.
NB: I worked at XKL for 10 years before coming to my present job 11 years
ago. Putting the Toad-1 into an FPGA was an experiment when I left. I was
ecstatic to learn of the success of the Toad-2 a few years later, but not
really surprised.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/