24 May
2016
24 May
'16
11:11 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated:
The Amiga has a minimal debugger embedded in the ROM that ran over the
serial port (9600 8n1). It would automatically become active when a Guru
Meditation (similar to a Unix kernel panic, or the Mac bomb, or the Windows
Blue Screen of Death) but you could get to it at other times as well (I
played around with it a bit). The debugger is *very* minimal (hex dumps of
memory and registers, you could modify memory and registers, resume, etc).
The original Connection Machine had one LED per CPU (max 65,536). You
could get some pretty impressive visuals out of that one.
-spc
On Tue, 24 May 2016, Charles Anthony wrote:
The data
switches would be examined by the operating system during boot
to enable debugging (pause at certain points during boot, eg).
I wish OS's still had something like this sometimes. Using a debugger over
serial, there are times when I'd like to step through code or stop the
whole kit-and-kaboodle. However, there are so many timers running in OS's
these days a lot of the time that sort of thing causes major pain,
especially with certain problematic drivers. Some of the
mainframes had hundreds and hundreds of lights, detailing
the internal state of the machine; mostly of interest to field
engineers.
It probably still impressed the suits when they walked the data center.
I've done data center tours with row after row of HP or Dell x86 servers
and it's not much to look at.