24 May
2016
24 May
'16
10:22 a.m.
On 2016-May-24, at 9:34 AM, William Donzelli wrote:
Well, everything is about money, so to speak.
Reducing costs was one motivation for eliminating the front panel, but not what made it
practical or feasible to do so.
The improved
reliablity of LSI logic over discrete and SSI, and the creation of ROM chips of reasonable
capacity (to hold the bootstrap or a monitor), would bring about the demise of the
blinkenlight front panel.
Note that only a couple of the first microcomputers had blinkenlight front panels, and
they were pretty much gone from minis and mainframes by the late-70s.
The demise was really about money. All those lights, switches, wiring,
metalwork, etc. for a full panel was EXPENSIVE.