5 ms·

I also wondered this, what did the pipeline company do if/when there was a loss of power?

• rst 6y ago
  What you saw was the cold start procedure for a completely uninitialized machine -- manually enter a short bootstrap loader of a dozen instructions or so, just enough to load a longer one from whatever I/O device was handy. A lot of machines had this kind of start procedure -- if there's a large row of switches on the front panel, that's probably what they were there for. (Core memory would retain its contents without power, so if you were absolutely sure nothing could possibly have disturbed that initial bootstrap routine since the last time you toggled it in, it might still be there. But a lab minicomputer of that era, probably didn't have any memory protection at all, so that's a pretty big "if".)
  • bananicorn 6y ago
    Why is this being downvoted? Is it incorrect?
    • implements 6y ago
      I saw a Prime 750 minicomputer cold booted exactly as described in the 1980s - so I can’t see any problem with that post. Edit: It’s describing a situation where a “Resident Monitor” isn’t built in, but is manually loaded after power up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_monitor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_monitor