Randell, I think we are remembering the same thing, but using different words to describe it. Using the 3 buttons, you would key in things like the boot disc controller address, the boot device, and the SYSnn. Having done that, you would then select Start System. The next time you boot the system, it would remember the boot parameters you used for the last boot.
I have a funny story about the button battery. One of the things it did was to maintain a real time clock and save the time while the system was off. When you cold load the system, NSK would read the clock and set the system time. Previous generations of systems didn’t have this. The first thing you had to do after a cold load was to use the SETTIME command to set the system time. The command required an obscure combination of numbers, colons, and commas. If you enter it wrong, you would get a variety of error messages, none of which included the correct syntax. If you didn’t cold systems on a daily basis you would always have to look up the command to get it right.
I was once setting up a CLX for a trade show in Phoenix one Saturday night in September. The hotel wouldn’t let us have access to the ball room until Midnight. Blurry eyed from travel, I didn’t get around to booting the system until about 2:00 AM. The button battery in the RMI had died, so it didn’t remember the time. I got the system to cold load, but the TACL wouldn’t let me log in until I manually set the time. Because of the real time clocks, it had been a couple of years since I had used the SETTIME command. Every permutation I tried yielded some variety of error messages. The strangest error was “Ambiguous time specification”. The command I was typing could be right or wrong, but how could it be ambiguous? I stood there cussing and kicking the machine for an hour. After an hour, the SETIME command magically worked! I brought up the system and went to bed.
As I was waking up the next morning, it dawned on me what had happened. I had been setting up the system during the transition from Daylight Savings Time back to Standard Time. At 3:00 AM that morning, the time would fall back to 2:00 AM. That is the only day of the year when all of the times from 2:00 AM to 3:00 AM occur twice. Once before the time change and a second time after. In fact, the times I was entering were ambiguous! If I had remembered more of the command syntax, I could have specified which 2:00 AM I was referring to.
Jon Marcus