One of the nice things about the MINC software images from Bitsavers is that there is a set of demo programs on one of the disks. Programs that are more or less guaranteed to work correctly – so that if something doesn’t, it is pretty much clear that the problem is in the hardware.
The program T6QUIZ is a showcase for the timer module: MNCKW. It uses the BASIC statements START_TIME and GET_TIME to keep track of the time that a user needs to answer the quiz questions. That didn’t quite work however : the time reported for a question would be added to the last reported time, instead of starting from zero for each next question. That turned out to be a simple priority issue in the MNCKW counter – adding the next time pulse had priority over resetting.
The fix is in the upcoming release – I’m finishing up testing the terminal, release will be ‘Real Soon Now’!