Computer speedometers

[Lee Courtney]

Stan,

IIRC the PA-RISC HP3000s display DEAD on the LED display if the system had
crashed.



Lee Courtney

MontaVista Software
1237 East Arques Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94085
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
> [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Stan Sieler
> Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 4:59 PM
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> Subject: Re: Computer speedometers
>
>
> Re:
> > > Has anyone done a similar thing with their vintage systems?
> On the 8080,
>
> The PA-RISC based HP 3000s have a "speedometer" built-in to the
> MPE/iX operating system.
>
> The older models have a LED display that usually shows FxFF, with "x"
> alternating between "F" and a value in the range 0..9,A which indicates
> (when multiplied by 10) the CPU's percent busy.
> Thus, F2FF means "CPU is 20% busy".  (The alternating between
> FxFF and FFFF gave the user a means of knowing whether or not the
> OS had frozen, otherwise one couldn't tell if a constant FxFF was
> meaningful :)
>
> The newer models lost the LED display, sigh, but the info is available
> at the operator's request ... in which case it will be displayed on
> the 25th line (the "status line") of the operator console.
>
> (On topic, because the 3000/930 was released in 1986.)
> --
> Stan Sieler
> sieler at allegro.com
> www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html
>