Tim wrote:
On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 15:58 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
full of blinky lights
Oh, and speaking of blinky lights. I always wondered what those sloping
computer panels full of switches and blinking lights were from on the
old Time Tunnel TV series. You'd see them in the background of various
TV shows and films. ;-)
Probably similar to the old PDP-8 I used - had a row of 16 switches,
under a row of 16 blinky lights. The O/S was on a mag tape, and it had a
whooping 8K of core memory - and I do mean *core* - there was one large
board with ferrite core memory, 2 sets of wires perpendicular to each
other and where each wire crossed, there was a iron ring encircling the
intersection. But anyway, to boot the machine, you had to input the boot
code *in binary* via the front panel switches - you would set the
switches for each 16bit instruction, then toggle another switch to
"ingest" the bits. Essentially the boot code said "read O/S from tape",
but took about 10 minutes to input. The blinky lights simply showed the
16bits of the current instruction...
John
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