History of XKL

Our Mission

We have set ourselves an aggressive mission: to identify problems in emerging network infrastructure even before these obstacles become evident to the Internet community. With this forward-looking approach, XKL provides the solutions necessary for the future growth and development of the communications industry.

XKL’s technical staff are experts in their fields. Pushing the limits of technology, tools, and components, we rewrite rules and test the unproven. We take the time to develop innovative solutions to problems that were thought to be intractable.

Our product development emphasizes architecture, not component technology. We focus on engineering for the most complex networks ever deployed.

A Legacy of Innovation

XKL was launched by Cisco Systems founder Len Bosack. Len is the 2009 recipient of IEEE Computer Society’s prestigious Computer Entrepreneur Award for founding Cisco Systems and pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology, and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry.

In its earliest days, XKL successfully built a compact, modern replacement for a massive mainframe computer system that had gone out of production. Many of these systems were deployed in key support roles, suggesting a need for a more modern platform as a migration path. The challenge at the time was to find a mainstream usage for a totally new technology: a platform with a desktop-sized footprint, but incorporating technology that would bring the system into the 21st century.

The resulting product represented a major technological breakthrough. The system exceeded all design goals and came equipped with such things as a modern disk subsystem and what was, at the time, the industry’s fastest backplane.

Beyond its primary objective, this first-generation product served two important roles: it provided springboard technology that could lead to today’s innovations, and it enabled XKL to gather a highly talented core technical team that has developed today’s DWDM product suite.

With the successful completion of its first product, XKL turned its attention to the data and telecommunications industry. By applying the same skills and technology to network architectures, the company continues to develop and release (for general availability) utility-grade products to support the Internet.

Our Mission

We have set ourselves an aggressive mission: to identify problems in emerging network infrastructure even before these obstacles become evident to the Internet community. With this forward-looking approach, XKL provides the solutions necessary for the future growth and development of the communications industry.

XKL’s technical staff are experts in their fields. Pushing the limits of technology, tools, and components, we rewrite rules and test the unproven. We take the time to develop innovative solutions to problems that were thought to be intractable.

Our product development emphasizes architecture, not component technology. We focus on engineering for the most complex networks ever deployed.

A Legacy of Innovation

XKL was launched by Cisco Systems founder Len Bosack. Len is the 2009 recipient of IEEE Computer Society’s prestigious Computer Entrepreneur Award for founding Cisco Systems and pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology, and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry.

In its earliest days, XKL successfully built a compact, modern replacement for a massive mainframe computer system that had gone out of production. Many of these systems were deployed in key support roles, suggesting a need for a more modern platform as a migration path. The challenge at the time was to find a mainstream usage for a totally new technology: a platform with a desktop-sized footprint, but incorporating technology that would bring the system into the 21st century.

The resulting product represented a major technological breakthrough. The system exceeded all design goals and came equipped with such things as a modern disk subsystem and what was, at the time, the industry’s fastest backplane.

Beyond its primary objective, this first-generation product served two important roles: it provided springboard technology that could lead to today’s innovations, and it enabled XKL to gather a highly talented core technical team that has developed today’s DWDM product suite.

With the successful completion of its first product, XKL turned its attention to the data and telecommunications industry. By applying the same skills and technology to network architectures, the company continues to develop and release (for general availability) utility-grade products to support the Internet.

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Our Place in History

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The Toad-1 was built as an extended version of the DECSYSTEM-20 from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which had ceased producing the PDP-10 variant in 1983. The original inspiration to build a desktop version of the popular PDP-10 dated back to the 1970s with a DEC development project called “Minnow.” While project Minnow yielded no product, interest in a small implementation of the PDP-10 continued. It was eventually built at XKL by veteran engineers from Cisco, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, and CDC, and led by Len Bosack, the co-founder of Cisco and a veteran of DEC and Bell Labs. XKL called it TOAD, an acronym for “Ten On A Desk.”

Let's Build A Better Network, Together.

Let's Build A Better Network, Together.