Machine console

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Illustration of a PDP 8e

The machine console is the lowest level in the hierarchy of user interfaces on older computers that could be reached without a soldering iron . Machine consoles can practically only be found in museums or very rarely in training or hobby projects.

Computers originally had no read-only memory in which at least a rudimentary operating system (such as BIOS or OpenFirmware today ) could be stored. So the computer was empty when it was switched on and did nothing, at least nothing useful.

The processor could initially be put into the halt state with a switch on the machine console. A memory address and a data word were then set in binary form using a number of switches and the data word was then written into the memory at the push of a button. As soon as a program was entered into the memory in this laborious way, the processor could be set to the start address of the program and the execution started.

Typically, the machine console was used to write a boot loader to memory, which in turn could be read by a more complex operating system from a medium such as tape or disk. Due to the relatively high stress on the switches, the machine consoles on mainframes were usually bulky. In older films, one occasionally sees data centers with a blackboard with rows of switches and flickering lights on the computer; this is mostly the machine console.

The IMSAI 8080 machine console can be seen in the movie WarGames , for example , where the teenage hacker had one in his room. In early minicomputers such as the DEC PDP-11 , a series of switches were used for both the address and data bits, with one switch taking the set value into an address register and another switch taking the set value into the value addressed by this address register Memory cell wrote.

With the first microcomputers in the 1970s (e.g. the Altair 8800 ), the machine console was sometimes not only the lowest, but also the only external interface for cost reasons , which leads to a lack of understanding among technical laypeople towards the "computer crazy" Could go to extremes.