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…
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.
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…
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.
Sounds like the Connection Machine from Thinking Machines. It appeared in the movie Jurassic Park.
I was right - according to this interview of Danny Hillis:
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.
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.
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.
I second this. It’s pretty neat to watch the flashing lights on my new router.
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.
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.
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.
I learned about doing assembly on SDS (later Xerox) Sigmas. A Sigma 7 front panel, with its lights:
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.
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 … .
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).