"Don't Care"

[compaqportableplus]

Was looking at this Digilog 820 Protocol Analyzer on eBay just to see what it even was, and because it looks like an old luggable PC, and was very amused to see that it has a "Don't Care" key on the keyboard. (eBay link for anyone interested: https://www.ebay.com/itm/155725741578)



I kind of wish all computers had this. I can think of a few cases where it would be very handy!

 

[Chuck(G)]

On a logic analyzer, the key makes perfect sense. I have a keyboard with a red "Panic" key.

 

[VERAULT]

Id ware the "dont care" key completely off these days

 

[SomeGuy]

I want a "No, dammit!" key that I can press whenever one of those abusive [YES] [Maybe Later] dialogs appear.

 

[tradde]

You mean the "Do you want to do this" and you say No and it does it anyway?

 

[syzygy]

I hope this is not offensive to anyone....Some 33+ years ago, I wrote an OhSh!t key for my PC-XT. It is a TSR that said "OhSh!t" (out of the PC speaker) upon Left shift+Alt key. I used Borland TASM to assemble and link it again today (removed some personal information). It is intelligible, but barely - hey what do you want for 1-bit A2D speech?

Source and executable files are attached as a .zip (edited to add the original .doc file)

 

[DougM]

That was one thing I loved about Eagle PCB layout software, there was a message that said, "this value cannot be changed, do you want to change it anyway? <Yes> <No>"

For me it would be a lot more valuable to have a key that said, "Just Frickin' do it!" so any time the computer came up and told you it couldn't do something you just hit the "don't care" and "JFDI" keys in combination

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Presumably the “Hex” key brings up a dialog asking you where on the virtual voodoo doll you want to insert the pins.

 

[whartung]

was very amused to see that it has a "Don't Care" key on the keyboard.

I've seen life philosophies shared on T-shirts, but never a keycap.

 

[3lectr1c]

I want a "No, dammit!" key that I can press whenever one of those abusive [YES] [Maybe Later] dialogs appear.

My pet peeve is when the options are "I'm in!" and then "No thanks".

 

[ACK]

A Computer Keyboard Made For The Present Generation !

 

[eswan]

So, the seller made me a decent offer on this and I bought it. He did an excellent job of packing, fully surrounded by expanding foam in a bag. It's a frickin beast, somewhere around 80 pounds and 2 feet long. Gives new meaning to 'luggable'. Seems to have been made around 1987-1988. Looks like a multibus system, with the 85+60 pin edge connectors. It's throwing a 'No interrupt from the Winchester board' on startup and refusing to do anything else. Has a Seagate ST-225 hooked up to an Adaptec 4000 series MFM->SCSI adapter. Pulled the drive and hooked it up to a Gesswein MFM emulator and was able to image it off without problems. Possibly one of the quietest MFM drives I've ever come across. Reseated all the cards and put it back together, but still no IRQ. I think my next step is to hook up a scsi adapter to the Adaptec board and see if it's getting that far.
Poking around the disk image, it looks like there's an 'A' (application?) processesor, a 'W' (Winchester?) processor, and a 'D' processor. Interestingly, it seems to refer to the 3.5 floppy as a 'Sony', as in 'the Sony drive'.
It's vintage test equipment that's also a vintage computer!