Bad Joke. Bad Bad Bad! Front panel for a PC?

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Mon Jul 28 10:33:41 1997

<but then again, I do have a PC-XT motherboard to waste... It would be
<interesting... Is it possible? It would score high on the nerdity
<scale...

The 8088 would be difficult to make a hardware style front pannel like the
PDP-8e or 11/70s had but a software front pannel is doable with a spare
parallel port or homebrew IO card. It would have to ahve some software to
dump registers to lights based on switchs, load registers from switches
(at least 16 of them for data/addresses) also other things like single
stepping and single instruction would have to be handled. The other
possibility is an embedded ODT like the 11/03, 11/23 or later q-bus PDP-11s
have. IT allows memory display, changing locations, halting, running from
an address and display/load registers from a terminal(console).

Allison
Received on Mon Jul 28 1997 - 10:33:41 BST