Dave Plummer
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I had to rewrite the BSD kernel to make the lights work.
What is, what's...
So the very top is a PDB 1170 control panel, which we can largely ignore.
And then there's two chassis below that.
The knobs control what view you get of the LEDs.
So normally you see the data bus and you can see the address bus.
And you can pause the machine.
You can edit the address on the bus.
And you can deposit stuff into memory with the switches.
Yeah, it's a weird floppy drive.
It's a dual floppy drive with one stepper motor.
So both heads seek together like Siamese twins.
Yeah, so I restore them.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's all real.
Wow.
Then I had to rebuild the kernel and all that, so I had to learn the BSD kernel.
I'm pretty familiar with it now.
Because you can't just add a device driver, right?
You've got to rebuild the kernel to add support for whatever device.