Firefox for ever

[John Burton]

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