#front panel

[commodorez]

A little bit of soldering later, and the new Cactus front panel is coming together nicely.

Did a few power-on smoke test, then installed the IC's.

After that, the only thing left to do was plug it into the Cactus SBC and see if it works.

Damn, that's 【 æｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ】（く内ラ） as fuck.

After I figured out that my bench supply was causing brown-outs, I swapped it for a simple wall wart, and magically things started working right.

So far, I've identified a few faults that need fixing, but the bulk of things are working as intended. Hell yeah. Only took me 5 years to get around to it...

One feature that has never worked right on the hand-wired prototype now works: Memory Protect. It effectively prevents both the CPU and user from writing to RAM while the Protect light is illuminated, assuming that the RAM in question has the appropriate circuitry installed. It's a feature I stole from ...that was inspired by the OSI-300.

Anyway, I'm hype as fuck right now.

[wallpapers4screen]

[aaaaaaafrogs]

Finally finished my most ambitious Hatchetfield project yet. Every box in the border represents a different Nightmare Time, as well as Hey Melissa, Trail to Oregon, Workin’ Boys, the BBQ monologues and Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel. The three large boxes at the bottom represent the three main musicals. It’s 18x24” and made with sharpie :]

[gomzdrawfr]

meow around and find out

Part 1

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (Page 32-35)

* You can find great things in the garbage dump! * You just gotta know how to look.

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[sweetmapple]

Varre and Ansbach dynamic as I see it

[slimetony]

composition with all the stuff i traced/doodled today

[arttsuka]

I was about to go to sleep but this awful idea came to my mind and I couldn't rest, I had to doodle it

[hood-ex]

Just thinking some thoughts.

Nightwing (Vol. 2) #119

Batman: Battle for the Cowl #3

Bonus:

Nightwing (Vol. 2) #105

[vintagehomecollection]

A Treasury of Great American Houses, 1970

[commodorez]

What was the purpose of the panels of blinking lights on those big mid-century computers? Were they showing calculations in progress?

Excellent question, this is one of my favorite subjects! Blinkenlights serve a number of functions. Hollywood tended to use just the lights to make it look like a computer was busy doing something, but real computers had more than just lights on their front panel. Let's walk through a few examples of use cases with photos of computers I've seen over the years at museums and vintage computer festivals:

Some front panels were built to be used for diagnostics. Computers like these were primitive enough that they required constant care and debugging to do their jobs, especially the early vacuum tube machines (everything pictured here is transistorized). You could tell what peripherals were being used, but also check the status of registers, carry flags, status flags, data, various buses, etc. It was also a way to see if a program had "gone off into the weeds" and started doing things that were irregular, possibly due to a software bug, or a problem with the hardware.

On many of these machines, you can enter programs directly into the main memory using the front panel, but it's an incredibly tedious process -- something to be avoided if possible. Consider it a last fallback.

Other times, it's a starting point, which we call "bootstrapping" (this eventually evolved into the term "booting"). You aren't likely to program everything on such a limited interface, but you are more likely to enter in a small program that can tell the computer how to run a more complex peripheral, like a paper tape or punch card reader, or maybe some type of magnetic storage device. Once you can get a program loading off of a larger permanent storage device, you can load up software to interface with a terminal of some kind which is much easier.

Eventually, the microprocessor made home computers a possibility, but many were only equipped with a front panel out of the box. You would have to add in a serial card, more RAM, possibly some ROMs, and either a teletype or glass terminal in order to get a more sophisticated and intuitive interface from the computer, capable of programming in a higher level language. Some were considered more like trainers, or hobbyist devices, and simply lacked that ability, meaning all you got was a front panel with switches and lights.

I made my own front panel to see what the experience was all about:

Then everything changed in 1977, with the introduction of these three machines: the TRS-80 Model I, the Commodore PET 2001, and the Apple II. They were what you might call "appliance computers" and they had no need for a front panel.

Hopefully that answered your question!

[wallpapers4screen]

[cloroxcasser0le]

Jax has a flashback after looking at corn 🌽

Pretty fast paced. I’m bad at comics lol

[xeemaee]

I love kabru queening out with that elven dignitary so much

Probably flirting his ass off rn lets be so real

In my mind the last panel is a mix of laios being upset kabru didn’t translate everything AND being jealous that kabru was flirting in front of him because I can believe whatever I want fuck you

[arsenicxarcana]

happy stabbing caesar day, i inked this thing

[fatehbaz]

weekly navel-gazing update: this week is most consequential event in long time. keyword search: "scared" "is it ok to be scared" "beaten and tortured by the ogre"