The TV series “Time Tunnel” used a lot of them apparently.
The first time I worked for a company that owned a computer was in 1980; I was 40 years old at the time. This was a BIG mainframe job that was housed, under lock and key, in an air conditioned, humidity controlled room. I’ve forgotten now who made the thing but it was covered with blinkenlights; it even had a reel to reel tape deck that moved forward and back, at varying rates of speed. We had one guy who knew and loved that thing; he claimed he could get lots of info from the blinkenlights but wouldn’t share that info with anyone, or at least with a noobie like me. We didn’t have a CRT monitor in the place; all the users had to make do with dot-matrix printers. But we were allowed to create our own specialized programs using GWBasic Anytime customers visited our facility, that computer was one of the high spots of their tour. I knew nothing about computers then and even less now.
Yes, I used to operate an IBM370/138 (IIRC).
The array of lights allowed you to examine the contents of each register, set and load memory, etc.
While running programs you could watch the various lights blink.
Plus, there were various alert state indicators too. And, IBM was famous at the time for their style which included pushbuttons with lights in them. And scrolling screens of marginally meaningless informative log entries on the operator screen. Watch the cockpit scenes in 2001 for a good idea of the IBM design style. The story goes that IBM helped Kubrick until they realized that the movie was about a killer computer. Then everything was shifted a letter.
I think only once did an IBM repair guy actually use the buttons and lights to diagnose something on our mainframe. By then most machines had sufficient microcode they could tell you what the problem was. Repair manuals were a step-by-step process; set these switches, push this, read the indicator lights. Eventually it will tell you which board to replace. There were also hidden indicator lights inside the machines.
Even today, you get the little connector lights on the equipment like modems and especially those huge network switches. Blinken lights that indicate network traffic levels and also connectivity, speed (yellow for 10Mbps, green for 100Mbps, etc.) Even most network cards have a connectivity light and maybe a traffic light.
Basically, like most stuff Hollywood, it had meaning to the few people who understood it, but the “effect” was techie enough that it became Hollywood shorthand for “honkin’ big computer” - just like those 12-inch reel tape drives - remember them?
I actually used the switches and lights to write and run a 10-byte counting loop program on a PDP-6 from the front panel. Just for fun…
Actually, what’s hilarious is to watch old Buck Roger original 1930’s and 1940’s serials. In the days before jets and space rockets, Hollywood shorthand for “powerful flying machine” was the sound of… a giant rotary piston engine. Buck’s rocket sounded like a DC3. We’re so much more sophisticated today, where the Millenium Falcon sounds like a 747.
Absolutely.
More reminiscing: I started my first job after college in 1984. My job: design, test and integrate software. I did not have a computer terminal in my cubicle. Design and test software. No terminal in my cubicle. At that time, we would try to use terminals in a common terminal room, but if space wasn’t available, which happend frequently, we’d write our software on pieces of “paper” using “pens.” One night about six months after I started, a group of us went through the entire building gathering statistics about the distribution of terminals among the different departments. Then we stormed the Bastille** and within another six months, we all had our precious (monochromatic, text-only) 3270 terminals in our cubicles.
Back then, we wrote software patches in machine language. Not assembly; that was for pussies. This was machine language, and it had to be machine language, because peforming a full build could take more than eight hours, and reloading the entire image in EEPROM could be another hour. Of course I forget the actual opcodes, but if you blur your vision a bit, the following would be a typical snippet, loosely saying, “load register 0 from the RAM address 0xF255, then branch if nonzero forward 8 instructions”:
8060
F255
7A08
Then we burned our patches (from 1 to 50-ish of these 16-bit words) into EEPROM and rebooted. Then we watched the blinking lights…
** Sent out a strongly worded memo noting an apparently inequitable distribution of computer resources.