On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 09:40 -0400, John Burton wrote: > 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 > But the PDP 8 was a 12 bit machine !!!! PDP-11 was 16 bit John -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
