3 ms·
Luxury! (Monty Python voice) In my day we had to enter the bootstrap from the front panel switches. Seriously though, we did, if you had money you bought this
by Taniwha 2y ago
Luxury! (Monty Python voice) In my day we had to enter the bootstrap from the front panel switches.
Seriously though, we did, if you had money you bought this board - it wasn't as bad as you might think, the old PDPs had core which didn't lose it's contents when you powered them off, usually the bootstrap was still there
- zh3 2y agoMy first boss was a demon at loading the bootstrap, fingers sweeping back and forth across the panel to bring the system up every morning. Later I got to write a boot ROM which supported 5 different drive types (4 types of floppy from 3.5" to 8" and Winchester hard drives), complete with terminal prompt, multi-unit support and interupt handler. I got it to fit into 256 words (2 256x8 PROMS) with some trickery (I still recall being out of space by one word and needing 204 for a sector read command - finally, remembering I had 102 in a register from loading the BEV vector, shifting that up one saved a load and so got it to fit).
- cesaref 2y agoI had an 11-23, and that had a monitor in the CPU (proper CISC!), writing to a serial port. That meant that I typed the boot loader into a terminal, and hence had a pre-recorded sequence I replayed to the port to boot the machine.