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From: gk@kksys.UUCP (Greg Kemnitz)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards,news.misc
Subject: Re: History: foo and fubar are unrelated
Message-ID: <417@kksys.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Oct-87 22:28:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: kksys.417
Posted: Thu Oct 15 22:28:51 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Oct-87 07:58:05 EDT
References: <1266@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK> <1632@chinet.UUCP> <1539@cognos.UUCP> <1810@killer.UUCP>
Reply-To: gk@kksys.UUCP (Greg Kemnitz)
Organization: K and K Systems, Minneapolis
Lines: 22
Xref: mnetor comp.misc:1484 comp.unix.questions:4548 comp.unix.wizards:4956 news.misc:1036

In article <1810@killer.UUCP> jfh@killer.UUCP (The Beach Bum) writes:
>recall FOO pre-dates the 8008.  If I remember (which you may have figured
>I really never do ;-) correctly, the IMSAI and ALTOS machines were
>octal in the beginning.  (Actually, I don't think they were anything.  Didn't
>they just have a switch registers and LED's above each paddle?)

I assume you are referring to IMSAI and ALTAIR, rather than IMSAI and ALTOS.

The ALTAIR front panel was originally designed with octal in mind --
the switches were grouped in threes, rather than fours.  When IMSAI
released their machine, they went with larger paddle switches
physically grouped in eights, but color coded in groups of four.  This
made hex to binary conversions easier on the poor soul who had to
bit-flip in their four thousand byte program.

Most ALTAIR owners I know eventually masked off their front panel in
groups of four to achieve this same convenience.
-- 
Greg Kemnitz              |   amdahl \
K and K Systems           |   ihnp4   !meccts!kksys!gk
P.O. Box 41804            |   rutgers/
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