Turkey's Den

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Artillery of the Great War

Many a good alternate history begins with the premise, “what if the Roman Empire never fell?”. One thing is for certain: the lowly legionnaire might have looked like this. From artist Léo Ferland-L'Abbé.

Inspired by this terrific painting from Ariel Perez:

By the early middle ages, the roman army had become aesthetically similar to the famous barbarian hordes at the period, particularly because

A: the swelling number of barbarians in the army

B: the loss in wealth to organize as the roman as they had at it’s 2nd century height, let alone kit out the army in lorica segmentata looking ass plate armour such as what inspired the above concept art

C: the plain fact that the roman army had dominated the field for so long, that it’s neighbours began to imitate and incorporate the look and loadout of the roman army. The same way how today, all modern armies all look the same in their same fucking camo uniforms and shit.

had the western army never fallen, it would likely continue down the same path of armament that the eastern empire did. If one were to look at Eastern roman armour in the 14th century, it would look like this:

oddly, these romans who DID last to the time before the renaissance not only look REALLY, TYPICALLY MEDIEVAL but actually share some similarities to the islamic armies at their gates

Had the roman army lasted until the modern period, it would look VERY much like other modern armies

alot of people, in doing OMG WHAT IFFfffffFfff scenarios like what a world war 1 soldier would look like if the roman empire never fell, begins their premise with the false idea that the roman soldier stayed as they were in the 2nd century and never changed at all until the day they got guns lol

so behold, this is how the roman army wouldve likely looked in world war 1:

Assault Armour of 5th Engineer Regiment from the Kingdom of Italy dated around 1915 on display at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, Austria

The 5th Engineer Regiment of the Royal Italian Army fought on the Italian Front against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Engineer regiments were responsible for maintaining the mechnised transport and supplies lines of the army as well as mining battalions. Armour for the engineers would have protected them while working but it proved to be too cumbersome and heavy for practival use.

Excellent question, this is one of my favorite subjects! Blinkenlights serve a number of functions. Hollywood tended to use just the lights to make it look like a computer was busy doing something, but real computers had more than just lights on their front panel. Let's walk through a few examples of use cases with photos of computers I've seen over the years at museums and vintage computer festivals:

Some front panels were built to be used for diagnostics. Computers like these were primitive enough that they required constant care and debugging to do their jobs, especially the early vacuum tube machines (everything pictured here is transistorized). You could tell what peripherals were being used, but also check the status of registers, carry flags, status flags, data, various buses, etc. It was also a way to see if a program had "gone off into the weeds" and started doing things that were irregular, possibly due to a software bug, or a problem with the hardware.

On many of these machines, you can enter programs directly into the main memory using the front panel, but it's an incredibly tedious process -- something to be avoided if possible. Consider it a last fallback.

Other times, it's a starting point, which we call "bootstrapping" (this eventually evolved into the term "booting"). You aren't likely to program everything on such a limited interface, but you are more likely to enter in a small program that can tell the computer how to run a more complex peripheral, like a paper tape or punch card reader, or maybe some type of magnetic storage device. Once you can get a program loading off of a larger permanent storage device, you can load up software to interface with a terminal of some kind which is much easier.

Eventually, the microprocessor made home computers a possibility, but many were only equipped with a front panel out of the box. You would have to add in a serial card, more RAM, possibly some ROMs, and either a teletype or glass terminal in order to get a more sophisticated and intuitive interface from the computer, capable of programming in a higher level language. Some were considered more like trainers, or hobbyist devices, and simply lacked that ability, meaning all you got was a front panel with switches and lights.

I made my own front panel to see what the experience was all about:

Then everything changed in 1977, with the introduction of these three machines: the TRS-80 Model I, the Commodore PET 2001, and the Apple II. They were what you might call "appliance computers" and they had no need for a front panel.