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Article #678Re: Blinking lights ...
From: br... Brian Kantor
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 1990 06:04
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 1990 06:04
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The nicest set of CPU lights I've seen were on the old Burroughs B6700; there was a light for each bit in every register. When the machine was idle the processor lights spelled out IDLE; later they changed that to show the big Burroughs B. This was a 48-bit machine and we had the dual-processor model - there were a LOT of lights on that beast. The killer was that most of those lights were also pushbuttons and pushing them set the bit in the associated register. This could be real interesting and make for bizarre system crashes, as we found out one day whilst playing tennis in the computer room. Seems that a flying tennis ball has plenty enough force to activate several adjacent buttons when it hits the processor console.... Whadday mean, HALT/LOAD for negative time of day? - Brian
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!sunic!luth!eru!bloom-beacon!snorkelwacker!apple!rutgers!ucsd!brian From: br...@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Blinking lights ... Message-ID: <10752@ucsd.Edu> Date: 3 Jan 90 06:04:47 GMT References: <9385@asylum.SF.CA.US> Reply-To: br...@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) Distribution: alt Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd. Lines: 15 Posted: Wed Jan 3 07:04:47 1990 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit