🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <15...@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> mo...@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) writes:
>(but already-obsolete) Burroughs 6700. (Sigh)

this was one of the great machines of its time ... (I, of course,
am biased)

>room window so users could watch the lights blink.  The most noticable
>feature on the front panel was a rectangular grid of 192 lights.
>You could tell at a glance how heavily loaded the machine was, since 
>the MCP's idle process would put a "B" (the Burroughs logo) in the 
>lights whenever it was running. 

and therein lies another story ... because we all started out telling the
operators that when they saw the 'B' the machine was lightly loaded so
they would stuff more work in. The problem was that when the machine got 
overloaded and started to thrash its little guts out it would go into
disk wait as it shuffled data in/out of core, the 'B' would come on while
it waited for disk and the operators would stuff more work in - such
positive feedback was bad news ....

We solved it by changing the macro that put the 'B' up (MCP was shipped
to sites in source form - card images (not actual cards) - you compiled
it and installed it when you brought up a new version of the OS (it didn't
always compile first time of the tape without syntax errors!) - anyway
back to the story - we change the code that put the 'B' up to but up
3 faces, a smiley face :-) when the machine is dead empty, an open mouth
:-() when the machine is lightly loaded and a frown when it was thrashing :-(
(they were vertical smileys) this stopped the operators from over stuffing
the machine .... maybe we were an early user of icons ....


	Paul


-- 
Paul Campbell    UUCP: ..!mtxinu!taniwha!paul     AppleLink: CAMPBELL.P
"We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man,
Got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand ..." - Neil Young 'Freedom'