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Comment by M95D | Hacker News Reader

What was the most weird answer that you could check on that test?

For me, it was "0x11A Have you ever toggled in boot code on the front panel?" When I still used PATA HDDs and BIOSes didn't have F11/F12 boot menu, I wired a front panel switch to Master/Slave HDD jumpers, so I could toggle boot drive without entering the BIOS setup. I guess that counts.

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It's a wee bit different. It wasn't my time, so someone correct me if my details are wrong, but this is using the rows of switches on the front panel of, say, an early IBM machine to actually put in the bootloader code in binary. I.e you could do something like set the address with one set of switches, set the opcode with another set, and press a button (or something) that would then write that opcode into that point in memory. Repeat until you've put the whole bootloader in. And, I imagine, hope you never have to go through that again.

Yes exactly this. For example on the PDP-11: https://cdn.changelog.com/uploads/news_items/RRqw/large.jpg?...

Probably not super weird for a lot of this crowd, but

"Have you IPLed an IBM off the tape drive?"

considering I'm in my 30s and it happened within the last couple years, is likely pretty weird :)

They mean like toggling the switches on the front of a PDP/8 to make it do something other than be a paperweight.

There was a time when I could toggle the PDP-8 RIM bootstrap loader by heart (my programs had a nasty habit of destroying the memory-resident copy by accident).

sorry friend, no that does not count

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