| Field |
| Which field does this skill apply to? |
| Went Obsolete |
| When did this skill become obsolete? |
| Made Obsolete By |
| What made this skill obsolete? |
| Knowledge Assumed |
| What does the reader need to know to use this guide? |
| When useful |
| When is this skill still useful? |
You turn the computer on, and maybe push one or two buttons. This is hardly an obsolete skill; it's the way all computers work nowadays.
Now keying in the bootstrap program through the front panel switches - now that's an obsolete skill...
The front panel may have had rotary switches labeled 0..F (e.g. IBM 360/20), or more likely had sixteen toggle switches arranged in groups of 3 (octal - DEC, HP, Data General, etc.) or four (hexadecimal - Interdata, IMSAI etc.). You first had to select a start address, often, but not always, zero. Then you entered the codes for each machine instruction, and pushed buttons to store the instruction in memory, and to select the next address. You did this for four to forty or more instructions. Then you set the switches to cause the computer to execute the program just entered. Depending on the computer, this loaded the system from punch cards, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk, etc.
After you had done this a few hundred times, you no longer had to refer to the printed instructions.
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2008-05-09 13:30:46 It's probably an EPROM now with the information maintained by a battery. But the field it applies to is the starting up a computer. It has never become obsolete. The knowledge assumed is out to turn the machine on. —w2bsa
