front panel display for a modern PC

[John Floren]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:40 AM, Josef Chessor <josefcub at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 11:33 AM, John Floren <slawmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > I'd really like to have something like one of the old
>  >  mainframe/minicomputer control panels for my PC, but I'm just not sure
>  >  how to implement  it. Anybody here tried something like that? Ideally,
>  >  you could power it on, see registers, toggle stuff into memory, have
>  >  lights for interrupts, that kind of thing. Yeah, I know, as soon as I
>  >  bring up an operating system, the ability to toggle things into memory
>  >  would be rather dangerous, but I just can't resist the charm of the
>  >  idea :)
>  >  So... doable? Impossible? Improbable?
>
>  My first thought was "That's a lot of lights and switches!"  On a
>  modern, 64-bit, PC we're looking at roughly what, 128 switches?
>  Yeowch!
>
>  Now I do know of this kit, in prototype stage from Briel Computers:
>
>  http://www.brielcomputers.com/altairpc.html
>
>  Certainly not exactly what you were thinking of, but in a similar vein.
>
>  Josef
>

That is a lot of switches, but didn't CDC (and other companies, I just
thought of CDC first) make 60-bit and other large word-size machines,
which I can only assume also had front panels? Sure, it may be
annoying and impractical to have 128 switches, but it would be fun to
make and play with. I guess if it comes down to it, I could just make
one for the parallel port and figure out some way to interface it to
various simulators...
The biggest hurdle, I guess, would be figuring out how to interface it
to the machine in a good way. The second biggest problem would be
finding where to get that many identical switches and lights without
bankrupting myself.

John
-- 
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