XKL

XKL, LLC is an American company that develops optical transport networking technologies.^[1] Founded in 1991 and based in Redmond, Washington, XKL is led by Cisco Systems co-founder Len Bosack.

XKL, LLC

Company type	Private
Industry	Telecommunications Optical networking Computer Networking
Founded	1991; 34 years ago (1991)
Founder	Len Bosack
Headquarters	Redmond, Washington , U.S.A
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Len Bosack and Sandra Lerner
Products	Darkstar Optical Network Hardware
Website	www.xkl.com

History of XKL

In its earliest days XKL developed, and in 1995 introduced, the TOAD-1, a compact, modern replacement for PDP-10 systems, mainframe computer systems that had gone out of production.^[2]

Products

TOAD-1 unit on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, WA

Current products

Products include transponder, muxponder, mux/demux (multiplexing/demultiplexing) and (optical) amplifier models.

DarkStar DQT10 Transponder

Supports 12, 24 or 36 10G channels.

DarkStar DQT100 Transponder

Aggregates up to 96 100G channels onto a single pair of fibers.

DarkStar DQT400 Transponder

Aggregates up to 48 100G / 400G channels

DarkStar DQM100 Muxponder

Aggregates up to 12 100G channels via statistical multiplexing.

DarkStar DQM10 Muxponder

Aggregates up to 36 10G channels.

DarkStar DSM10-10 Muxponder

Aggregates up to 100G services.

DarkStar DXM

First released in 2007, the Darkstar DXM is a high-performance optical switch first installed at the California Institute of Technology as part of their Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge. It provides 5 times the bandwidth, in excess of 100 Gigabits/sec, than the existing system but is also smaller and uses less power.^[3]

Historical products

TOAD-1

The TOAD-1 System, also known as TD-1,^{[notes 1]} was announced in 1993 and built as an extended version of the DECSYSTEM-20 from Digital Equipment Corporation. The original inspiration was to build a desktop version of the popular PDP-10 and the name began as an acronym for "Ten On A Desk". It was eventually built at XKL by veteran engineers from Cisco, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, and CDC.^[4]

XKL TOAD-2 on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington.

Full view of the XKL TOAD-2 on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington.

It was the first XKL product produced and it became available for purchase in late 1995. The TOAD-1 is a high-performance I/O oriented system with a 36-bit processor running TOPS-20. It is multi-user system that can provide service to over 100 users at a time. The TOAD-1 architecture incorporates modern peripherals, and open bus architecture, expanded physical and virtual memory while maintaining the TOPS-20 user environment.^[1]

TOAD-2

The TOAD-2 was built to replace the TOAD-1. It is a single chip reimplementation used as redundant control processors in networking equipment from XKL. It can be configured for TOPS-20 timesharing.^[4]

See also

Other companies that produced PDP-10 compatible computers:

• Foonly
• Systems Concepts

Notes

1. The TOAD-1 was referred to as the TOAD as a development codename and then changed to the TD-1 as the original marketing name. It was then switched back to TOAD-1 before production began.