Firefox for ever
John Austin
ja at jaa.org.uk
Wed Jun 18 15:01:14 UTC 2008
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
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