On Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 11:20 AM Henry Bent wrote: > > > On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 at 13:16, Dan Cross wrote: > >> >> The Motif-version was especially horrible, and crashed all the time. The >> curses-based version was called `smitty`, which I found humorous in a way I >> wouldn't have expected coming from "This page intentionally left blank" >> IBM. In my mind, the worst part of admining RS/6000 boxes of that era was >> the little 3-digit LED code on the front: I guess those machines didn't >> assume that they had either a graphical head or a serial port, so this damn >> teeny tiny display would cycle through a sequence of codes that told you >> what the machine was doing; it came with a book that told you what each >> code meant. Something like "387" meant mounting /usr. Ugh; I just found a >> page on ibm.com describing these "IPL codes." >> >> > That seems to have been a general IBM-ism. The BIOSes were the same way - > they would display a series of numeric codes on the screen and if it > stopped somewhere you had to drag out the manual and look up why. > I have a port 80 decoder that let's me see the same thing but w/o the need for video to work... the same codes on the screen were outb'd to port 80... came in handy for driver debugging too Warner >