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In 1994 we contacted Texas Women University to try to resurrect their DECSYSTEM-2065 which had just been switched off into hibernation in an underground machine room. Our proposal to the dean of the CS Dept was that we would maintain the system and pay for its electrical consumption (approximately $1200/mo) if they would allow it to remain in the machine room and provide us with a network connection. Unfortunately our proposal got bogged down in academic bureaucracy .. perhaps now the 2065 is scrap? Bruce?

Later that year Doug Englebart of the BOOTSTRAP Institute referred us to a freelance Field Service Engineer named Bruce Kennard. After a few conversations, Bruce offered us a KS10 in exchange for selling one of his shiny new HYUNDAI Electronics SPARCstation 10 clones. The price for the HYUNDAI was $14,000 and, though we tried, were unable to sell any of the work stations.

In 1995 we were talking with Pat Tressel, a woman with two KS10s in her living room, about our plans. We then tried to pursue a solution with an EMULEX tech to see if a PDP-10 UNIBUS to SCSI BUS adapter could be created. There actually is a PDP-11 UNIBUS to SCSI BUS adapter, but it needs to be made clear that the two UNIBUSes are very different. That said, running a reliable set of drives that didn't require three phase power pretty much kept us down. Pat wanted to give us a KS10, but without a solution for storage, we worried the machine would just sit.

Mark Crispin (MRC) told us of a KS10 which had recently been put back into service at the University of Washington LOCKE Computer Center for the purpose of data recovery and migration. It was running TOPS-10 and could be accessed via the INTERNET for a few months. MRC helped to cooridinate a bit for us when the machine came up for auction though unfortunately we were outbid.

In 2000 Bob Supnik released his SIMH emulator which succesfully emulates an array of architectures including the KS10. We began running TOPS-20 4.1. It was accessible via telnet through an emulated DZ11. Unfortunately the DZ11 was unreliable, the KS10 had no ethernet support and TOPS-20 4.1 did not support TCP. On top of that, the KS10 could only support a small number of users compared to the 25000 users on our UNIX side who were curious about TOPS-20.

OPTION ONE: XKL created the TD-1, a smaller, slightly faster version of KL10B.
OPTION TWO: KLH10. We had been corresponding with Ken Harrenstein since 1994. Ken had a implemented a KL10B emulator successfully on the DEC ALPHA under OSF1. Because of legal reasons, Ken was not entirely sure he would allow us to use his emulator.

2000-2002: simh KS10 running TOPS-20 with virtual DZ lines 2002-2021: KLH10 with support for 8 RH20s which could handle up to 7 or 8 RP07 disk drives (about 500mb each), under SMP NetBSD on a DEC Alpha 5300 2021-2065: XKL Toad-2

About the PANDA

When we moved to KLH10 running the PANDA distribution of TOPS-20 the machine was named KANKAN. MRC was very fond of the pandas at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo and ran a machine known as LINGLING (LINGLING the Panda lived from 1985-2008). In 1972 the Ueno Zoo received its first ever Panda couple: KANKAN and RANRAN from Beijing. Because the toad-2 is designed for redundancy we have named toad-2a KANKAN and toad-2b RANRAN to continue the long association of PANDAS at the Ueno Zoo and TOPS-20 PANDEMONIUM.