Wrong bridge......?

And since we are talking very early computing goodness.....the -Very- first box I ever laid hand on was the venerable Altair 8008, owned by a close friend. Wanna break someone's reality? Sit them down in front of an Altair class computer and inform them that those 8 switches are the data bus, those 16 are the address bus, and that small group is the command control switches for things like read/write to system memory, program execution, and interrupt. First mainframe I got to manhandle was a PDP-11 in tech school.....and I got to laugh my geekish ass off at the nimrods trying to bring a donated Altair to life. They bought a 3 card add on to the 2 slot off the shelf board, and actually connected the two with 4" long pieces of 22 ga bell wire. And could never figure out why things didn't work. The school spent over $5k on dual 5.25's, honest to Ghod 64 meg DRAM S-100 cards, TTY interface, and that hideously expensive video card that could actually display 80 characters per line.

Naturally they didn't listen to the 1st quarter weenie who told them about capacitance and inductive effects and their effects on backplanes......and nearly 3 years after that they still hadn't figured it out.........  >:)