It was a safety net designed to prevent operational error. Naturally, there are limits.
It was a quaint implementation on the 3b2. I think that’s the gist of discussing it anyway.
However, you can see how the 3b2 designers stressed about a user having to deal with an operating system that required care in understanding that you can’t just remove power. Rather, an orderly shutdown were required.
If you want to yank the plug, by all means, have at it. But, I can tell you that I suspect you are the exact type of user that the 3b2 designers felt they were up against in designing this obviously over engineered hardware.
Of course, your point is a good one. Especially, since countless UNIX boxes at the time had nothing more than a good old power switch that truly was akin to yanking the power cord—-thus, procedures must be followed.
Yet, it’s still cool that the 3b2 has that little integrated power feature that most fondly remember. (Maybe I am on the wrong channel, this is TUHS, right?)
It might be worth noting, nearly every UNIX box today (even x86 hardware) has some variety of this power feature today. So, clearly the 3b2 was ahead of its time (along with a few other vendors)
One last point, I have an original NCR minitower UNIX box. This box had a unique feature where it’s solid state RAM would be backed up by a battery. The registers were saved. So, if you yanked out the power cord, the system would pick up right from
where it left off. Of course, all of the terminal users would need to redraw their screens. But, this box was immune to yanking out the power cord. If you wanted to reboot the kernel, there is a procedure to start from scratch.
Truly,
Bill Corcoran
So prohibiting someone from pushing a button differed in what way from allowing them to pull a plug? I can understand there may have been some difference in state when/if the machine was rebooted. If I just
wanted the machine to cease sucking power, what's the difference? I never wanted that box to exist, or come back to life, in whatever color.