13 Aug
2020
13 Aug
'20
11:19 p.m.
On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 at 13:16, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The Motif-version was especially horrible, and crashed all the time. The
curses-based version was called `smitty`, which I found humorous in a way I
wouldn't have expected coming from "This page intentionally left blank"
IBM. In my mind, the worst part of admining RS/6000 boxes of that era was
the little 3-digit LED code on the front: I guess those machines didn't
assume that they had either a graphical head or a serial port, so this damn
teeny tiny display would cycle through a sequence of codes that told you
what the machine was doing; it came with a book that told you what each
code meant. Something like "387" meant mounting /usr. Ugh; I just found a
page on ibm.com describing these "IPL codes."
That seems to have been a general IBM-ism. The BIOSes were the same way -
they would display a series of numeric codes on the screen and if it
stopped somewhere you had to drag out the manual and look up why.
-Henry