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Cisco is a famous example. They were founded to build a clone of the beloved PDP-10 mainframe. To bring in some cash they made copies of the stanford LAN routers the team had designed and built at Stanford. Turns out a lot of people wanted networking gear.

Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10 clone.



Which in turn pivoted to optical networking equipment. ;)


Well by that point the market for PDP-10s was pretty much nil.




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