Rick Stevens wrote:
Nope it's not a PDP/8 though I did work on that one too, typed my Master's thesis up on one (then re-typed it into an IBM DisplayWriter -- but that's a whole 'nother story :-). This thing was built on an Intel 8008 (follow-on to the 4004, not to be confused with the later 8080) . The 8008 is a tiny 16 pin ceramic dip package that clocked address and data in and out serial thus required a lot of support. The rack-mount backplane is wire-wrap so I suspect there were not a lot of them made. It uses (then) standard "Flip Chip" boards for I/O. There is a custom processor and memory boards (one "4K x 8" board for RAM one board for EPROM). I spent a lot of my young life playing with this thing. If I come across the front panel I'll post a picture of it somewhere on the web.M.Hockings wrote:
Rick Stevens wrote:
Wow, Rick I'm impressed - if you you like LEDs and switches you GOTTA be a good guy!Rob Park wrote:
Gareth Bult wrote:
Please can we have something on the graphics output such that when the disk reaches it's maximal mount count and goes off into a disk check - we get some notification ?
I noticed the same problem. It freaked me right out, I thought it had hung or something, until I switched VTs and saw what was happening.
There is a spot on the boot screen where you can click and get the good ol' text startup screen displayed. It's up to you which you prefer.
Me, I'm old school. I like to SEE what's happening. I was very ticked off when front panel LEDs went the way of the dodo. Yes, I'm an old PDP/VAX/S370/Altair/IMSAI guy. Hey, I used to bitswitch in my own boot loaders back in the day! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com - - - - UNIX is actually quite user friendly. The problem is that it's - - just very picky of who its friends are! - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Or just really, really old! :-P
Last night I was rummaging through some boxes to find a switch to fix something and came across an old 8008 (yes, that is typed right) computer made by DEC with front panel switches (in octal) to load it with and lots of lights.
An 8008-based machine or one with 8008 in it's name (e.g. the old PDP8, which was a 12-bit machine)? I don't recall a DEC 8008-based machine unless it was one of the original proof-of-concept things prior to the mistake called the Rainbow. Let's see...MITS made the Altair 8800, IMSAI made the IMSAI 8080...Polymorphic made the Poly 88...oh, I could go on and on...
The power supply used to have the bypass transistor sitting in a bowl of water because I could not afford a heatsink and a fan to keep it cool enough. Brings back some memories...
In my case, nightmares! I've been down the plastic-bag-and-water or 5-gallon-bucket-of-transformer-oil road myself, so I feel your pain. :-D
Ahhh, but I digress, back to my Fedora machines that have a lowly power indicating LED.
Well, at least mine have disk activity LEDs, too.
Here at the office we have a thing I made, just to be silly, since some of our clients refuse to believe they're computers unless they have blinking lights. It's a bunch of LEDs on various timing circuits. We call it the "ULD" (useless LED display).
Kind regards,
Mike
At one point I picked up an HP removable hard disk unit that I had ideas of connecting to it but I couldn't imagine what I do with 5M of disk space as I could switch in most of my programs in not that great amount of time ;-)
Mike
