36bit still in use ?

[Roy Hirst]

Although here at XKL we don't still use TOAD-1s in the business, we do 
have a few engineers here in R&D that are bit-level familiar with the 
beast, even tho' the last living instance I believe is now at the Museum.
I'd need to stay well clear of anything XKL-proprietary, but I would be 
happy to interview them and to put together a technical briefing on 
stuff we can talk about. Would take me a week. Let me know if that would 
help, and if there's any doc gaps that I might help fill. I'm new to 
this forum, I can't tell what level of reverse engineering folk are 
aiming at, are folk pursuing emulators, simulators, what? Does the 
Museum provide some kind of a reverse-engineered BOM? I don't know where 
you would actually buy a TOAD-1 (almost certainly not from us, I think, 
but I will check) and our last one I suspect is the one proud in baby 
blue on the Museum's video.
Roy

*Roy Hirst* | 425-556-5773 | 425-324-0941 cell
XKL LLC | 12020 113th Ave NE, Suite 100 | Kirkland, WA 98034 | USA

On 12/4/2014 3:03 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2014-12-04 08:25, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
>> Pontus <pontus at update.uu.se> writes:
>>> Perhaps you could elaborate on the compatibility between the TOAD
>>> versions and other PDP-10 processors. Also what operating systems do
>>> they run, both previous and current versions?
>>
>> I'll contribute the technical information I have.  Happy to take
>> corrections or additions!
>>
>> The TOAD-1 was XKL's first PDP-10 clone, created around 1994.
>>
>> The CPU is called XKL-1, and is a model B with an extended virtual (30
>> bits) and physical address (33 bits) space compared to the KL10 model
>> B.  It's clocked at 33 MHz, and has 128K of cache and 8K TLB entries.
>> The microcode control store has 8K 128-bit words.
>>
>> Similar information for more 10s here:
>> http://pdp10.nocrew.org/cpu/processors.html
>
> As far as I can recall, the TOAD-1 is not compatible with the KL10B. I 
> don't remember what the differences were, but I understood that 
> TOPS-20 had to be modified in an incompatible way to run on it. Which 
> was unfortunate, in that SC also made extensions, but they were more 
> in line with how the KL10B works. So we got two different branches 
> when the architecture was expanded from the KL10B. Unfortunately I 
> don't remember if it was the paging system or the I/O system where 
> they diverged.
>
> Someone who knows more details who can correct me on this?
>
>     Johnny




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