Front Panels - Thoughts

[tony duell]

> 
> Hi Tony
>             I seem to remember, certainly in OEM land there were dev.
> systems with front panels and production systems without.
> In other words  the front panel was option and could be fitted.

Sure. The PDP8/f and PDP8/m are the well-known example. Many of the
Philips P800s had optional full panels too (fortunately the ones I own
do have the full panels). And there must be many more

But I still claim it is difficult to add a panel to a machine that was never 
designed to have one. In the case of machines with optional full
frontpanels the machine was designed to take a frontpanel and either
to also run without it or there was some minimal panel (boot/reset/not
much else) that provided enough logic that the processor didn't realise
it didn't have the full panel (if you see what I mean).

-tony