[TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 11:20 AM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 at 13:16, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> 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

>
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