Re; Graphical Boot

M.Hockings veeshooter at hockings.net
Thu Dec 11 01:43:32 UTC 2003


Rick Stevens wrote:

> M.Hockings wrote:
>
>> Rick Stevens wrote:
>>
>>> 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 at vitalstream.com -
>>> - 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!               -
>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>> Wow, Rick I'm impressed -  if you you like LEDs and switches you 
>> GOTTA be a good guy!
>
>
> 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
>
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.

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







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