7 ms·
I have a giant knife switch bolted to what looks like a thick slate base, which (reportedly, according to ebay seller) used to operate a lift in a goldmine in C
by zh3 4y ago
I have a giant knife switch bolted to what looks like a thick slate base, which (reportedly, according to ebay seller) used to operate a lift in a goldmine in Colorado. Long term plan is to mount it to the wall, so when I leave the office at night I can throw this big old switch and turn everything off.
- julian_t 4y agoMany (many!) years ago I worked with a PDP-8 that had ferrite core memory. Because the magnetic state was persistent, come 5pm we'd just throw the switch and turn the machine off. 9am the next day we'd turn it back on, and it would continue with whatever calculation it had been doing the night before. It would have been cool to have a real mad-scientist switch like that, though.
- zh3 4y agoI started on PDP-11s and big old boards stuffed with 64x1kb RAM so I had it relatively easy. Not quite the same, but every morning the boss would boot the system with 5 sweeps across the toggle switches to key in the bootloader. After that, all we have to do was occasionally move the teletype back into its corner on the room when it went walkies. Have a look for "Vintage knife switch" on ebay; here's a current offering (only double pole): https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/295179145552 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/295179145552