On Time Tunnel what you're actually seeing are components from Army surplus computer hardware. Specifically pieces of a SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) computer. In its day it was the physically largest computer ever built. SAGE was an air defense computer network that was the forerunner of today's air traffic control system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environment Irwin Allen bought the stuff for use on his sci-fi shows. You see the same stuff on Lost In Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I worked with a PDP-11/45 that had a DEC front panel. IBM made the ones that just screamed "I AM A COMPUTER!" Mike Harpe --- On Wed, 6/18/08, John Burton <j.c.burton@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > From: John Burton <j.c.burton@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Subject: Re: Firefox for ever > To: "For users of Fedora" <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 9:40 AM > Tim wrote: > > On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 15:58 -0400, Ric Moore wrote: > > > >> full of blinky lights > >> > > > > Oh, and speaking of blinky lights. I always wondered > what those sloping > > computer panels full of switches and blinking lights > were from on the > > old Time Tunnel TV series. You'd see them in the > background of various > > TV shows and films. ;-) > > > > > Probably similar to the old PDP-8 I used - had a row of 16 > switches, > under a row of 16 blinky lights. The O/S was on a mag tape, > and it had a > whooping 8K of core memory - and I do mean *core* - there > was one large > board with ferrite core memory, 2 sets of wires > perpendicular to each > other and where each wire crossed, there was a iron ring > encircling the > intersection. But anyway, to boot the machine, you had to > input the boot > code *in binary* via the front panel switches - you would > set the > switches for each 16bit instruction, then toggle another > switch to > "ingest" the bits. Essentially the boot code > said "read O/S from tape", > but took about 10 minutes to input. The blinky lights > simply showed the > 16bits of the current instruction... > > John > > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
