> > Hi Tony > I seem to remember, certainly in OEM land there were dev. > systems with front panels and production systems without. > In other words the front panel was option and could be fitted.
Sure. The PDP8/f and PDP8/m are the well-known example. Many of the Philips P800s had optional full panels too (fortunately the ones I own do have the full panels). And there must be many more But I still claim it is difficult to add a panel to a machine that was never designed to have one. In the case of machines with optional full frontpanels the machine was designed to take a frontpanel and either to also run without it or there was some minimal panel (boot/reset/not much else) that provided enough logic that the processor didn't realise it didn't have the full panel (if you see what I mean). -tony