front panel display for a modern PC

Chuck Guzis wrote: I suspect it has more to do with technology price-point. I couldn't have build an operating system for an unmapped Nova in 1974/5 without one; "program load" was an uncommon option on earlier versions of the later 800/1200 family and even then required the switch register in order to get the device code to use. Bigger iron had the option of dedicated supervisory processors, but I doubt that the "affordable" (i.e., low five figures) minicomputers of the early-to-mid 70s could have really managed that trick without breaking the bank. In my experience the front panel was also critical for figuring out what new and novel way the machine had broken. MTBF was measured in months, and while a machine might have been too sick to load diagnostics it's surprising how much could be learned by poking at it through the front panel with a scope handy. This proved true even in somewhat extreme cases, like the early S/200 with interleaved core in a memory expansion chassis that tended to fail pretty much any time the metal door to the machine room was opened or the 800 that we had to repair ourselves after the company with the maintenance contract refused to touch it (a current loop TTY with a hot chassis had worn through its data cable, dumped line voltage onto the loop, nuked the current loop/EIA converter, the mux, part of the bus interface on every board in the chassis and a chunk of both CPU1 and CPU2). -- Chris Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97 "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."