It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated: > On Tue, 24 May 2016, Charles Anthony wrote:
> > The data switches would be examined by the operating system during boot > > to enable debugging (pause at certain points during boot, eg). > > I wish OS's still had something like this sometimes. Using a debugger over > serial, there are times when I'd like to step through code or stop the > whole kit-and-kaboodle. However, there are so many timers running in OS's > these days a lot of the time that sort of thing causes major pain, > especially with certain problematic drivers. The Amiga has a minimal debugger embedded in the ROM that ran over the serial port (9600 8n1). It would automatically become active when a Guru Meditation (similar to a Unix kernel panic, or the Mac bomb, or the Windows Blue Screen of Death) but you could get to it at other times as well (I played around with it a bit). The debugger is *very* minimal (hex dumps of memory and registers, you could modify memory and registers, resume, etc). > > Some of the mainframes had hundreds and hundreds of lights, detailing > > the internal state of the machine; mostly of interest to field > > engineers. > > It probably still impressed the suits when they walked the data center. > I've done data center tours with row after row of HP or Dell x86 servers > and it's not much to look at. The original Connection Machine had one LED per CPU (max 65,536). You could get some pretty impressive visuals out of that one. -spc
