Blinking nuisance or blinkenlights?

On Tue, 1 May 2018 03:20:04 +0200 (CEST), Nomen Nescio declaimed the following:

Closest I got was porting an application from PDP 11/70 to VAX 11/780 (nasty job -- the /source code/ was FORTRAN-IV produced by a "C" style pre-processor (the original application had been produced by some contractor, but we didn't get the pre-processor, just the output).

My OS (assembly) and Pascal (UCSD) classes did make use of a CRDS LSI-11. It had a tendency to overheat in the small room we had, with the result that we often had to slide the cover off and aim a room fan at it. The 8" floppy disk controller turned out to be Intel 8080 -- without the

Ah, yes - I remember it well. One of my memories was that the 11/70 had to be taken down and all the cards reseated weekly to keep it running reliably.

We had terminals that were like that. The board contacts weren't gold-plated.

One computer was in a tiny room with a huge air conditioner, and they shut it down every night. It was quite flaky. One day a CE pulled a board to re-seat it, and one of its VLSI chips fell right out. The thermal cycling from the daily startup and shutdown of both the machine and the air conditioner had caused the chip to literally walk out of its socket. We got the customer to leave everything on 24/7, and the problems went away.

A large number of short bits of copper wire plus a soldering iron will save that. Granted, it makes swapping cards a lot more difficult, but how often do you ever do that in running machine really?

Not often. Hot-swappable cards came later. :-)

Ah, then you've seen 2 :)

The VAX 11/780 had an embedded PDP to handle booting and console communications.