On the -11/45 V6+ at MIT, we didn't have a printing terminal on the console, just a VT52. We had a tool at MIT called 'dmesg': http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/man8/dmesg.8 which made up for that a bit. We normally ran with the CSR set to 173030 - the 'boot in single-user' setting. That's because at one point the machine was in the 9th floor machine room, but the console VT52 was on the 5th floor (where our offices were - the famous print of the GE-645 Multics was on the hallway wall outside mine :-), and I'd added a 'reboot()' system call (nothing fancy, it just jumped to the bootstrap ROM), so we could reboot the machine without going up in the elevator (not if it had crashed, of course). Later on, after we'd done with kernel hacking (adding a network interface, and IP), and the machine stayed up for long periods, we moved the console up next to the machine (since if it crashed, you had to use the front panel to restart it, so you had to be up there anyway); we stayed with the default CSR setting, though. (If it panic'd, you could see the reason why when you went to reboot it.) Maybe at: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Sixth_Edition#Distros which discusses it? Noel