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> Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 > operating system on its very first routers

AFAIK, TOPS-10 only ran on 36-bit PDP-10 hardware. And the only PDP-10 clones I know of were made by Foonly and some even more obscure companies, all of which folded pretty quickly in the 80s.

I can't imagine Cisco doing a PDP-10 clone, or even emulating one. The networking software on TOPS-10 wasn't much to write home about, either.

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The previous post made me want to go digging and ended up finding this gem[0].

Looks like you're both kind of right- Stanford wrote the code for their first routers to run off on top of DEC/TOPS machines, and then the code was lifted from Stanford by Cisco.

[0]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2309917/lan-wan-router-...

That makes a lot more sense; written in relatively portable C instead of the sea of MACRO-10 assembly statements I had imagined.

Thanks for the clarification!

But one of the founders of Cisco did end up doing a PDP-10 clone called the TOAD-1 at his next company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKL

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