[cctalk] Re: [List] Re: Fun with PDP11 Assembly Language

Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation#/media/File:MoM… That's probably one of the most recent machines with significant lights on it. Speaking of neat "idle" lights patterns, I still remember the one on a Burroughs 6700 mainframe at TU Eindhoven. It had a panel full of lights, not quite 195 sized but still large. When idle, those lights would show the Burroughs logo, about a foot tall. My favorite example for the other extreme is the CDC 6000 series mainframes, with no lights at all -- but instead a vector text display refreshed by a dedicated processor, allowing it to show the system state Right Now. Nothing like it for being able to judge changing vs. frozen state anywhere in the system -- process state, any memory you wanted to see, I/O channel status -- all refreshed 30x times per second or so. Also a nice example of doing much with little memory: the controlling processor was a 12 bit machine with 4k words of memory. paul