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Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:27:05 -0500
From: Alex Stangl <alex@stangl.us>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
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Subject: Re: Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)
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On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 01:38:44PM +0100, RW wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Oct 2010 21:10:28 +0100
> Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I wonder why it was brass/ferrite rather than brass/empty or
> ferrite/empty.

I was wondering the same thing. I suspect one of them may be equivalent
to empty electrically, however this way is less errorprone,
explicitly populating each slot, rather than relying upon empty,
which could in fact be a mistaken omission.

Alex