flashing computer lights like the old days(eg Seaview style)

[bunyip]

While a modern PC may be far superior to a 50's supercomputer, the one thing it sorely lacks compared with its ancestors is the impressive bank of flashing lights-mine has but 2, only one of which blinks occasionally.
This will not do.
Would it be possible to produce a display of LEDs,say 50cm square, displaying what the machine is "thinking and doing"?
Is the architecture of a modern PC such that you could have such a display;to plug into a port, or as a card.
I'm thinking as much of a work of art as an engineering display, but one based in the reality of the machines processes, so that you could correlate actions take with lights flashing.
I guess with the speed of modern PC's you'd have to sample activity every 10th of a second or so rather than real time.
I'm definitely thinking flashing lights rather than a monitor graphical display of activity.

[Padeye]

Jeez, get a Lite-Brite and duct tape it to your CPU.

AFAIK real computers never had such displays beyond the most primitive ones in the forties. The only exceptions are the trainers I used in the navy. Ultra simple "computers" with less register capacity than a four function computer. The lights allowed us to see each register as the steps in each operation took place.

Trying to do that with a modern processor would be impossible. Even if you did it with an ancient Z80 on a CP/M machine or the 6502 in an Apple II or Commodore the clock frequency would be too high to see on and off states of the register bits.

[NotMrKnowItAll]

Don't forget about the sound effects. Instead of the boring wheee-o wheee-o sounds, you could assign sounds to particular tasks:

Norton or McAffee: Kill da Wabbit...Kill da Wabbit

Windows Kernal Stuff: mMMMMmm mMMMMMm (flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz)

Excel: "One cypher cypher naught cypher...." Jethrow from Bevery Hillbillies

etc.

[TheLoadedDog]

The various types of OCR-based mail processing machines we have at my workplace have these displays. Instead of representing computing processes, each light flashes briefly as a letter travels past one of many sensors in the mail path.

This gives the 1960s / Batman / Computer-gone-mad effect I think you're after.

[WillGolfForFood]

AFAIK real computers never had such displays beyond the most primitive ones in the forties. I seem to remember the then-brand-new IBM 360/65 we used to run at college in the late sixties having a main console that featured those banks of LEDs. They used to turn on and off a lot faster than the ones displayed in the movies, though - unless you had the machine paused/single-stepped they usually all looked uniformly half-on.

[ticker]

Buy yourself a network switch. My Linksys has several lights which flash periodicaly - more when you use the network.

[bunyip]

I know that the clock frequency of a Z80 or IBM 360 would be too high.
Read the post!I said sample at 1/10 th of a second or so.
I belive that the Univac display was more for show that reality in the early 50's election on TV.
But still would it be possible as an art form to sample the computer an display the results as flashing lights, as well as the monitor?

[sailor]

>> AFAIK real computers never had such displays beyond the most primitive ones in the forties.

Not true. In the early 80s I used (IIRC) a DEC PDP11 which had all the lights and switches. To start you would set the sitches to load the address of the boot device which was a punched paper tape. That would load the boot program, which, in turn would load the rest of the software.

With the switches and lights you could *in theory* load a computer program by hand.

[Hail Ants]

Even the original mainframe computer, ENIAC, didn't have them. Well actually it did, but they were completely for show. They were added for a newsreel story on it.

[Zagadka]

Just get into case modding. Nothing says "I'm so cool, let me DCC you a picture of my computer because no other living human has ever been in my room to see it" like a polished metallic-blue case with a plastic screen showing the neon-lit innards of a machine with more fans than a boy band (nevermind the pun).

OK, so I'm just jealous because I never put in the neon lights.

[Truth Seeker]

Originally posted by sailor
>> AFAIK real computers never had such displays beyond the most primitive ones in the forties.

Not true. In the early 80s I used (IIRC) a DEC PDP11 which had all the lights and switches. To start you would set the sitches to load the address of the boot device which was a punched paper tape. That would load the boot program, which, in turn would load the rest of the software.

With the switches and lights you could *in theory* load a computer program by hand.
Yes, I once worked in an office with an ancient one of these, a legacy system. IIRC, the hard drive had a removable platter more than a foot across that held a wopping 10MB!

This computer also had a panel that with 16 lights and toggle switches that allowed you to "see" what the computer was thinking at any given moment. Most of the times, the lights looked half on all the time. However, this computer had a personality. When it was doing certain operations, the lights would flash in distinct, recognizable patterns and the disk would whir in a particular, identifiable way.

Once, someone re-wrote the boot file so that would go into a loop and display a "light show" on the front register panel on April 1st. Good times!

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

Is there a screen-saver that would meet this man's needs?

[Nametag]

http://casemods.pointofnoreturn.org/cpumeter/

[happyheathen]

As late as the late 70's, IBM's S370 machines had tiny incandescent (IIRC) bulbs on the face panel (also a large, red push-butto labelled 'IPL' (what you know as "boot" - Initial Program Load).

[JimOfAllTrades]

Originally posted by bunyip
Would it be possible to produce a display of LEDs,say 50cm square, displaying what the machine is "thinking and doing"? Ok, not exactly LEDs, but core memory you could watch in action: Williams Tubes!

My younger brother recently sent me a quote from a book he is reading about Project Orion (the plan to use nuclear bombs to push a craft into space). In one spot in the book, he says it goes into a little history of atomic weapons, including the development of the hydrogen bomb in the late 40s. The computer used (or at least one of the computers) used a little different kind of memory than we think of today. In an inconspicuous brick building, paid for by the AEC, in Building E, 40,960 bits of high-speed random access memory flickered to life. This was not the superficial flickering of later computers equipped with banks of diagnostic indicator lights. What von Neumann termed the memory organ of the Institute computer consisted of forty cathode-ray "Williams tubes," each storing 1,024 bits of both data and instructions in a 32 x 32 array of charged spots whose state was read, written, and periodically refreshed by an electron beam scanning across its phosphorescent face. The resulting patterns, shifting 100,000 times per second, were the memory, completely unlike the cathode-ray tubes in later computers that merely display the contents of memory residing somewhere else.So how’s that for your flashing lights? Ok, they would be way to fast to actually watch them and see much, but still cool.

Can you imagine a gig of memory covering the walls and ceilings of a room (ok, maybe a warehouse), and watching your program run? :)

[rowrrbazzle]

Originally posted by happyheathen
As late as the late 70's, IBM's S370 machines had tiny incandescent (IIRC) bulbs on the face panel (also a large, red push-butto labelled 'IPL' (what you know as "boot" - Initial Program Load).Definitely incandescent. Think half- or one-quarter-size flashlight bulbs.

[SC_Wolf]

You realize, that if you do get something like this set up, you really really should include an engraved plaque next to the lights that reads:

ACHTUNG!

Alles touristen and Non-technischen Lookens Peepers!

Das Machine ist nicht für Gerfingerpoken und Mittengrabben. Odderwise is Easy Schnappen der Springgenwerk, Blowenfuse, und Poppencorken mit Spitzensparken. Der Machine ist Diggen by Experten only. Is Nicht für Gerverken by das Dummkopfen. Das Rubbernecken Sightseenen Keepen das Cottonpicken Hands in das Pockets. So Relaxen und Watchen das Blinkenlights.

This is one variant of the "Das Blinkenlights" sign, which acording to it's entry in the Jargon File (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/blinkenlights.html) dates back at least to Stanford in 1959, but I've seen other sources say it goes back to German Engineers back in the first few years of NASA.

[Sam Stone]

Hell, the first computer I used was an IMSAI 8080, and it had a bank of LED's on the front, which represented the binary value of a memory location if you were toggling through memory, or could be programmed to do whatever you wanted when the computer was running.

Below each light was a toggle switch. To program this computer, you first hand-wrote your code out in assembly language. Then you sat down with a book and painstakingly translated the assembler into a series of machine instructions. Each instruction was then entered into the computer by setting each toggle switch to the correct value, then hitting the spring-loaded 'load' toggle. That would store the value, and move you to the next memory location.

To write a simple program that would do something like sequence the lights repeatedly, you've have to flip 8 switches then load, and repeat maybe 100 or 200 times. And god help you if you made a mistake, because debugging consisted of walking through those hundreds of memory locations and comparing the bits represented by the lights to what your handwritten notes said.

If the program still didn't work, then you'd have to go back through your hand assembly and make sure that was all okay. If it was, then you'd have to debug the program by hand, by pretending to be the computer and walking through the program line by line.

And in the end, if everything went right, and you finished your multi-hour switch flipping session, you might get the lights to sequence from right to left like a marquee.

It's hard to believe now, but seeing those lights sequence across was simply glorious. I enjoyed that more than seeing some spectacular 3-D ray traced animation today.

[happyheathen]

A gig of memory?

Children, children - look up the stats for an IBM S360-60 (or any other S360 or S370) - 16K was, at one time, a luxury.

For giggles, try to de-cipher:

http://www.wvnet.edu/history/neowvnet.html


equivalent to an IBM 370/158 with 3 Megabytes of memory and 6 channels


- Heathen, who used to program on a 370/145

[Truth Seeker]

Ehh? Toggle switches? You had toggle switches? Why when I was your age, we had to program our computers by touching two bare pieces of wire together! We would have walked a mile for a good toggle switch!

And don't talk me about LEDs! We just had one light, yep, and we all had to share it, too! Binary programming? Pshaw! In my day, we had unitary programming and we were happy to get it, dagnabit!

[happyheathen]

You had wire?!

Spoiled brats - we had paper tape and toothpicks! We'd happily spend weeks getting all the holes lined up all proper-like just to to ADD - we didn't have any of that fancy multiply/divide stuff...

[JimOfAllTrades]

Originally posted by happyheathen
A gig of memory?

Children, children - look up the stats for an IBM S360-60 (or any other S360 or S370) - 16K was, at one time, a luxury.Heathen, who used to program on a 370/145 Oh, believe me, I know. While I don’t go back quite that far personally (I started programming professionally in 1984) I certainly remember running 10 to 20 users on boxes with 256k of ram and 60 meg of disk, and thinking a box with 512k memory and 300 meg of disk was a big mother. :)

I was actually thinking of the 1 gig in a modernized version, with visible faces. I still think it would be a kick.

[Melraidin]

I had offered to create a light display for Cogeco. They're a cable company in Ontario, Canada, working with the @Home network. Some of the top technical people in the company were very interested in getting me to build something that would be rack-mountable and have tons of different types of LEDs. Only reason it never got built was a lack of funds and transportation. I had figured about $200 to build. Would have roughly a thousand LEDs all flashing in different patterns and such. Was a dream of mine....

[Badtz Maru]

I wish I could remember more about it, but back in the early '90s I read an article about one of the guys who developed one of the first really powerful parallel processor computers - it had a hundred or so processors equivalent to a fast 486, I believe. He thought that since his computer was going to be the most powerful in the world, it should have lots of blinking lights, and had engineers attach dozens of blinking LEDs to it. He said in the interview they technically did indicate something about the processes going on in the computer, but were essentially useless and there just because he felt they should be.

[scr4]

Originally posted by Badtz Maru
... back in the early '90s I read an article about one of the guys who developed one of the first really powerful parallel processor computers - it had a hundred or so processors equivalent to a fast 486, I believe. He thought that since his computer was going to be the most powerful in the world, it should have lots of blinking lights...
Sounds like the Connection Machine (http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/CM5.html) from Thinking Machines. It appeared in the movie Jurassic Park.

[scr4]

I was right - according to this interview of Danny Hillis (http://www.d.kth.se/~d95-aeh/hillis.html):
Omni: Why do Connection Machines have all those blinking red lights?
Hillis: They have some diagnostic use, but basically, who wants to spend his life working on something that looks like a refrigerator?

[CalMeacham]

When I was an undergrad one of my suitemates built himself a computer, pretty much from scratch. He had a line of those LEDs with toggle switches, as several people above have described, to display the current line of memory displayed. When the computer was running, it looked like one line out of the Seaview light bank. He eventually added a disk drive, lifted from an IBM mainframe. This was about as big as the rest of the computer -- it was one wonking big disk drive. Something for you young whippersnappers to think about.

[sailor]

Just to expand a bit: A computer has *registers*. It has a register where the address is kept, it has a register where the instruction is kept, it has registers where data is kept, etc. Each register had a certain length of bits. The lights were just a reflection of the state of each bit in each register and the switches would allow you to set the registers to whatever value you wanted.

[Pergau]

Compaq servers from only a few years ago had a 2" square LCD screen on the box and this could be configured to show memory and kernel usage etc. I know it's not flashing lights but it is useful.

For flashy lights get a disk array and you will have lights on each disk to indicate power, activity and failure.

Still, it makes you nostalgic for those old tape drives and memory platters.

[Lute Skywatcher]

Originally posted by ticker
Buy yourself a network switch. My Linksys has several lights which flash periodicaly - more when you use the network. I second this. It's pretty neat to watch the flashing lights on my new router.

[BMalion]

And BIG reels of tape behind a glass door. I loved that stuff. I seem to remember the Jupiter 2 had those in the control room. I bet the NASA guys watching that show seethed with envy back then.

[dwc1970]

Has anyone ever seen those "handwriting analysis machines" (which it doesn't really do) at carnivals, fairs, etc.? I first saw these in the late 70s or early 80s when I was a kid. Behind the people in this booth is this large computer-like console with red and yellow flashing lights at the top. As a kid I thought that these lights were actually a functional component of the "computer" that supposedly scans your handwriting and produces a printout of the analysis, but I have long since then learned that this is just a gimmicky sort of prop and doesn't look nearly as convicing now as it did then that it was a real working machine. They still used this setup last time I saw it and it just looks so incredibly cheesy now.

[jsleek]

re: sailor's description of the diagnostic lights

I used to work on the 360. The lamps were flashing various register states which would be useful while running diagnostics. A bit that would not turn off (a hot bit) could be seen in the rows of lights. Before you began, you pushed the lamp-test button and replaced all the burned out lamps.

The console was a modified typewriter. It was always banging away making a list of jobs started and finished, and instructing the operator to mount a tape or start a deck of cards.

These machines made a lot of heat, so fans were constantly blowing through the stacks of circuits. Some machines were water cooled. Part of my job was checking the water level in the system.

One machine had a CUNT button; for Control Unit something something.

They don't make them like that, anymore.

[yabob]

I learned about doing assembly on SDS (later Xerox) Sigmas. A Sigma 7 front panel, with its lights:

http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/xdx/sig6pcpl.jpg

Note the 17 bit address, which addressed 32 bit words, for a whole huge, whopping 512K. Instruction times for simpler instructions were down into the single digit microseconds (I still have a manual for it - the instruction timing tables are pretty complex, owing partially to Siggy's extremely orthogonal instruction set which allowed everything to be turned into a cross-register instruction, indirected or indexed, rather than reserving opcodes for such things).

This machine was quite impressive for its day. A lot of places thought they were living large when they replaced an older mainframe with one of these.

[The Hamster King]

In the mid 80's I wrote photo manipulation software. This was in the days before Photoshop. A typical desktop system wasn't powerful enough for the job so the company I worked for had built their own rack mounted parallel processing system with all sorts of special proprietary boards to do different types of calculations.

No operating system -- the whole thing was held together with little snippets of Forth and Eiffel (!) running on the separate embedded processors. Minor system upgrades we could load from disk (using drivers I wrote) but major changes had to be burned into eproms. Part of the low level code was a little routine that would flash the front panel lights of the motherboard morse-code style so we could debug a faulty set of eproms ... .

[bunyip]

Thanks all.
And Nametag the "LED meter" is a pint size version of just what I was thinking of, and simple enough to build (Now if only it had 1000 Leds).