2 Mar
2008
2 Mar
'08
8:50 a.m.
On 2 Mar 2008 at 8:06, Vincent Slyngstad wrote:
The fact that you ever had to grap a 'scope and
read the P-counter
seems to support my argument for real lights, not refute it :-).
Nope--If I count the number of times I'd had to do that, I'd have
fingers left over. Those few times would never have justified the
cost of a dedicated front panel. I'm not even sure that the times I
did resort to the scope provided any useful information; mostly it
was an act of desperation.
The front-panel thing seems to have been a cultural phenomenon.
Seymour Cray put a nice front panel/console on the 1604, but it was
gone by the time of the 6600. IBM seemed to be reluctant to get rid
of them, but I wonder how many programmers actually had access to, or
could effectively use the front panel on a midrange S/370 to debug
their code.
I suspect the argument about the front panel on the IMSAI and MITS
boxes being part of the sales appeal holds quite a bit of merit. But
it represented a lot of componentry. IMOHO, the most useful LED on
the MITS front panel was the interrupts-enabled indicator (in a time
when most 8080 code for the box made no use of interrupts at all).
One could use it as a one-bit I/O port. My first experiments with
microprocessor music used it quite a bit for audio output.
Cheers,
Chuck