Front panel switches - what did they do?

[Charles Anthony]

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 9:34 AM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com>
wrote:

> > 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.
>
>
Yep. Later model models of the Honeywell 6180 replaced all of those display
panels with a minicomputer that generated video terminal displays of the
data.

-- Charles