Wang Thang

On Fri, 26 Jun 1998, Charles A. Davis wrote: Does the menu come up even when it hasn't managed to find a disk to boot from? The reason I ask is that there seem to be four keys that have different effects. I don't have any kind of monitor attached to the thing, so I can only make guesses based on the sounds the keyboard makes. (The system's speaker is located in the keyboard.) The four keys that do something are 'P', 'Q', 'D', and 'M'. Pressing 'P' has the most interesting effect. It seems to perform a cold boot. All six lights on the keyboard (including the caps lock light) turn on, then turn off in sequence. First off is the caps lock light, then the red LED at the left side of the keyboard, and so on to the right. There's quite a long pause between the third red LED and the fourth one, so it's probably performing a RAM check. After all the lights are out, there's a pause, then a beep, and then the floppy drive spins up. It whirrs for a couple of seconds and stops with a beep. This can be repeated endlessly by pressing 'P' over and over again, and is kind of fun. :) Pressing 'Q' just clicks the keyboard (most keys beep), then beeps, pauses, and beeps again. After the second beep the machine seems to be back in its original state again (where one can watch the blinkenleitz by pressing 'P', etc.) Pressing 'D' causes a beep, and then all the other keys click instead of beeping. The user is probably typing into some kind of shell at this point. Hitting <EXEC> followed by <RETURN> seems to get the machine back to the original state. Pressing 'M' seems to just make every key beep, and I haven't found a way out of this mode. Thanks for the warning. :) Doug Spence ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/