36bit still in use ?

[Sean Caron]

Someone in here (sorry forgot attribution) was just mentioning on another
thread maybe a week or two ago, that the guts of the TOAD-1 product live on
as the CPU of the WDM devices that XKL now produces.

But I never considered trying to find a firmware image and verify it!!

So it's true! Cool. I suppose if you spent all that time engineering that
CPU implementation, you'd want to amortize that effort as much as
possible... Sometimes very interesting things live behind the curtains in
the "embedded" space!

Best,

Sean



On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Jacob Dahl Pind <jacob at dahl-pind.dk>
wrote:

>
> Given the certain overlap of interests some of you might have seen this,
> please bare over with me.
>
> 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
>
>
> --
> Jacob Dahl Pind | telefisk.org | fidonet 2:230/38.8
>
>