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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Buy yourself a network switch. My Linksys has several lights which flash periodicaly - more when you use the network.
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?
>> 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.
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.
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.
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!
Is there a screen-saver that would meet this man’s needs?
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).
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.
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? 
Definitely incandescent. Think half- or one-quarter-size flashlight bulbs.
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:
This is one variant of the “Das Blinkenlights” sign, which acording to it’s entry in the Jargon File 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.
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.
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
- Heathen, who used to program on a 370/145
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!