Between 2006 and 2015, this Toad-1 hosted remote users to PDP-Planet and the Living Computer Museum. It was the first system in what eventually became LCM+L's core collection.

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."

The internals of the Toad-1 lived on in the Toad-2 processor used as the setup processor in earlier generations of XKL's high-end network switches.