front panel display for a modern PC

[Chuck Guzis]

On 2 Mar 2008 at 8:06, Vincent Slyngstad wrote:

> The fact that you ever had to grap a 'scope and read the P-counter 
> seems to support my argument for real lights, not refute it :-).

Nope--If I count the number of times I'd had to do that, I'd have 
fingers left over.   Those few times would never have justified the 
cost of a dedicated front panel.  I'm not even sure that the times I 
did resort to the scope provided any useful information; mostly it 
was an act of desperation.

The front-panel thing seems to have been a cultural phenomenon.  
Seymour Cray put a nice front panel/console on the 1604, but it was 
gone by the time of the 6600.   IBM seemed to be reluctant to get rid 
of them, but I wonder how many programmers actually had access to, or 
could effectively use the front panel on a midrange S/370 to debug 
their code.

I suspect the argument about the front panel on the IMSAI and MITS 
boxes being part of the sales appeal holds quite a bit of merit.  But 
it represented a lot of componentry.  IMOHO, the most useful LED on 
the MITS front panel was the interrupts-enabled indicator (in a time 
when most 8080 code for the box made no use of interrupts at all).  
One could use it as a one-bit I/O port.  My first experiments with 
microprocessor music used it quite a bit for audio output.

Cheers,
Chuck