Front panel switches - what did they do?

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated:
> On Tue, 24 May 2016, william degnan wrote:
> > Here's a power point pres I did at VCF-E4, this will get you started. 
> > Using Altair 680b front panel in basic terms is covered a few slides in. 
> > http://vintagecomputer.net/vcf4/How_to_Session/
> 
> There are some nice clean photos in that presentation. So, it was binary 
> with some hexadecimal addressing. I like the slide entitled "How to test 
> Machine Language Using a Program Listing Using Toggle Switches". That's 
> pretty hard core. I'm surprised they didn't at least use component 
> displays with LEDs to show the values rather than reading it straight off 
> some blinkenlights. Maybe those weren't around yet or were too expensive.

  Work with binary, octal and/or hexadecimal enough, and you'll learn how to
sight read binary patterns.  The conversion is pretty simple:

	  OCTAL		HEX
	- - -	0	- - - -	0	
	- - *	1	- - - * 1
	- * -	2	- - * - 2
	- * *	3	- - * * 3
	* - -	4	- * - - 4
	* - *	5	- * - *	5
	* * -	6	- * * - 6
	* * *	7	- * * * 7
			* - - - 8
			* - - *	9
			* - * - A (or 10)
			* - * * B (   11)
			* * - - C (   12)
			* * - * D (   13)
			* * * - E (   14)
			* * * * F (   15)

  So a byte value of

		* - - * - * * -

is hexadecimal 96.  On Octal, it wold be 226.

  -spc (I'll leave he decimal value to the reader)