Firefox for ever
John Burton
j.c.burton at gats-inc.com
Wed Jun 18 13:40:40 UTC 2008
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
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list