🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr25....@alliant.com>
we...@alliant.com (Ric Werme) writes:

>I had always felt
>a good diagnostic looked interesting...

Ok, as i once wrote BESM-6 (which meant for Soviet hacker civilization
more than PDP-10 for American) had a LOT of lights. Actually it had a
small lamp wired literally to every trigger inside the CPU. All those
lights were arranged in neat panels of CPU/memory module, surrounding the
operator's seat (sure, *the* operatror's place was near console teletype,
far from CPU :) (the view from top looks like the floowing ASCII picture,
though it does not represent the actual geometry but gives the idea:
	
       the tumbler panels and table
                 |
 the seat ---    v
         __  \    __
        | || []  || | <-- the actual cabinets
        \ \\_____// /
         \ \_____/ /
          \_______/

                          cpu 
front view:                |
                           v
      __ _________________ __
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  |
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  |
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  |
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  |
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  | <- indicator panels
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  |
     |  |*|**|*******|**|*|  |
     |  |_|__|_______|__|_|  |
     |  \_\__|_______|__/_/  | <- tumbler panels
     |  |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|  | <- desk 
     |  | |  |       |  | |  |
     |  | |  |       |  | |  |
     |  | |  |       |  | |  |
     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The indicator panels were black and transparent (if memory serves me
right, i haven't seen the beast for seven years) with neon lamps
shining through. At the tumbler panel was a small speaker.

Sure, there was a lot of hardware tests drawing dynamic patterns and
playing music. Some tests were imbedded in the OS (Tyurin's DISPAK at the
time i saw it; a descender of Tomilin's D-68). One of the most popular
hardware tests was running a light wave on indicators. 

(The following story i recollected from oldtimer's tales, for exact
details ask Valery Bardin, though i don't think he'll find time to
reply -- he's busy running RELCOM's commercial and political affairs).

So, once Valery hacked that test a bit to make the wave to rush in the
opposite direction and left it running in the morning. Few minutes after
a sleepy service engineer came in, stared *very* anxiously at the lights
and (loudly enough to be heard) said for himself "Yeah, it's time to give
up drinking".

Vadim Antonov
Berkeley Software Design, Inc.