Any what was this OS and text editor they used back then? https://i.imgur.com/UygEIkJ.png
Edit: well it's just a terminal not a full PC but seems to be model 1746? That's the closest shot https://i.imgur.com/mGlb2va.png
Edit: well it's just a terminal not a full PC but seems to be model 1746? That's the closest shot https://i.imgur.com/mGlb2va.png
There was another panel with somebody flipping what looked more like Digital Equipment Corp. switches. Normally, you would do that only when booting the machine: you would put in a program by setting switches for a few words in memory -- set, store, set, store,... -- and run that to read in and run a paper tape that itself had just enough code to read and run a boot sector from disk, and off you went.
The notion of buying expensive, read-only memory useful only when you boot was absurd. (You needed the paper tape reader anyway.)
Often there was a stick with notches for the switches. You would flip all the switches up and push the stick against them, pushing some down, and store, then rotate the stick and do it again. Cheap ROM. The program to read paper tape was very short.