PDP-11/44 boot prompt

Tony Duell wrote: I was sent there by the company I worked for at the time in preparation for starting up a new bakery (just happened to be the largest one in the world at that time.) It ended up that I became rather proficient at repairing the PDP 11/05 and the PDP-16s and never worked on the 11/45s at the plant. One cute (to me) story. I knew the 16s pretty well, but I was switched to another area and another foreman took my place. Well a problem developed with one of the computers and I was *told* not to take care of the problem. After a week of downtime, I was told to go up and see what the problem was. About 5 minutes after that, everything was back to normal. I had left specific instructions that the machines were not to be exchanged out except when a power supply went bad. A computer went down and the new foreman told the tech to change out the machine. Apparently the foreman was not well respected, and the tech just did as he was told (so I found out later when I asked the tech why.) A number of cards in the PDP-16 were specific to the location the PDP-16 was installed, and changing the computer out took these specific cards (constants cards) and put them on the bench with who knows what in the computer at that point. A quick change of cards solved that problem. An understanding of how the machine worked was what was being taught. Being able to find and define what wasn't working was one way of showing at least some understanding of how it worked. We only ran into trouble once when we taped the wrong pin and put the card back in. We ended up creating a problem with the microcode execution, and that one proved a bit difficult to locate (took us about 45 minutes or so to find the problem.)