> On Nov 1, 2015, at 3:13 AM, Brent Hilpert <hilp...@cs.ubc.ca> wrote: > > > The other way round I think, the Altair and IMSAI were the only S100 machines > I recall OTTOMH which had blinkenlight panels. > The vast majority of them didn't. Northstar & Cromemco as you say, Compu-Pro, > Vector-Graphic, Processor Tech SOL, Poly 88, etc. : no blinken. > > One problem with a front panel on an S100 machine - or any > microprocessor-based machine - is getting access to the program counter so > you can tell it to start running at some arbitrary address. The Altair/IMSAI > panels resolved this with a hack, jamming a jump instruction into the > processor data lines (not the S100 bus data lines) via a special connector to > a special processor card. > >
For the sake of completeness, the other S-100 machines I can think of with a full front panel were the Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1 and some BYT-8 machines. Regards, Jeff
