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

From: Daniel A. Seagraves <dseagrav_at_bsdserver.tek-star.net>
Date: Mon Jul 28 10:55:36 1997

On Mon, 28 Jul 1997, Allison J Parent wrote:

> 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).

I.E Making a new ROM. Well, I do have the IBM PC manual that has the ROM
unassembled in it... I thought those panels worked by playing with the
lines on the CPU. Sounds like more work than I have time to do now. I do
know that E11 lets you pull this off via the paralell port. It would be a
neat trick, if I had time to work at it.
Received on Mon Jul 28 1997 - 10:55:36 BST