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(a)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