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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