Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)

[David Brodbeck]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Arthur Chance <freebsd at qeng-ho.org> wrote:
> On 10/20/10 20:46, Bob Hall wrote:
> Getting back to reality, although I never did it (fortunately), a friend of
> mine who was about a decade older than me (I'm mid/late 50s) had the
> experience of programming microcode on a machine by inserting brass slugs
> for 0s and ferrite slugs for 1s on a pin board. Anyone got any idea what
> that was? He was (UK) military so maybe it wasn't a generally known box.

Don't know about that one, but some early desktop calculators (and I
think some early computerized phone switching systems) used etched PC
boards as ROM.  The HP 9100 had 32K of ROM on a 16-layer PC board
using this method.