Front Panels - Thoughts

[Jeff Galinat]

> On Nov 1, 2015, at 3:13 AM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> The other way round I think, the Altair and IMSAI were the only S100 machines I recall OTTOMH which had blinkenlight panels.
> The vast majority of them didn't. Northstar & Cromemco as you say, Compu-Pro, Vector-Graphic, Processor Tech SOL, Poly 88, etc. : no blinken.
> 
> One problem with a front panel on an S100 machine - or any microprocessor-based machine - is getting access to the program counter so you can tell it to start running at some arbitrary address. The Altair/IMSAI panels resolved this with a hack, jamming a jump instruction into the processor data lines (not the S100 bus data lines) via a special connector to a special processor card.
> 
> 

For the sake of completeness, the other S-100 machines I can think of with a full front panel were the Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1 and some BYT-8 machines.  
Regards,
Jeff