OK, yeah, I see what you’re saying. Between randomly rotating reels, flashing lights and all manner of beeps & boops, 60s / 70s era TV computers were pretty silly.
I believe the Bat Cave (Adam West era) had a computer with a lot of flashing lights.
I’ve always thought these should be mandatory. Makes working with computers much more interesting. Compared to the ones on TV in the '60s, today’s models are BOR-ING!
Lots of lights on this IBM 360 computer console:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/img_2631.jpg
My all-time favorite was in the movie Uncommon Valor with Gene Hackman and Patrick Swayze. At one point Hackman is training his team to go rescue the POWs in Vietnam, and the opening title at the bottom of the scene says something like “Somewhere near Galveston, Texas” or maybe “Somewhere near Houston, Texas”.
Which is uproariously funny, because there are clear mountains, or large hills in the background. The Houston/Galveston area is super flat. Like no natural hills of any kind flat. Like no hills to speak of until you get to the far side of Austin (~200 miles away) flat.
There’s a website that identifies which computers are in which shows
Some of them got re-used a LOT, like this one:
or
No kidding! (the image link looked broken within the thread, but clicking on it took me to the image). So, rows of dozens, if not hundreds, of lights was actually a thing, eh? I see from zooming on the image that each of those many lights had a label, but I can’t read any labels. What info is all those lights conveying?
I thought the tape might hold the program itself if it was too big for working storage, so the running back and forth might be: load program, load data, process, store, load new program, process, store, repeat.
Maybe the tapes aren’t moving back and forth. It’s a common illusion in movies and TV shows where a turning wheel appears to reverse direction, but really keeps turning the same way.
Why would you purposefully move furniture unless you were replacing it or renovating?
There’s also that puzzling scene in Ordinary People where Calvin and Beth visit Houston, and Calvin remarks on how he’ll never get over how flat it is. Not only is this an odd thing for him to say (he lives in the suburbs of Chicago, which aren’t exactly known for their mountains), but there are prominent hills clearly visible in the background while he says it.
I worked with a guy who had made all his money in London in the ?? 60’s ~ 70’s ?? rewriting data processing routines so that the tape went – one way – to the end of data, then – reverse – through the data doing the second pass in reverse order. People laid out the data on the tape very poorly …
His secret super-power skill was that, being Australian, he wasn’t obsequious and subservient to the senior staff who had done it wrong in the first place.
Sometimes (very, very rarely) the camera got close enough to the lit buttons on the bridge of the TOS Enterprise that you could see they had alphanumeric codes stenciled on them. I believe the only time this was referenced was in “The Ultimate Computer,” when Chekov checked the Engineering panel and reported the G-26 system (I think) was dead.
Because you want to change how the room looks a little bit even though you don’t want to buy all new furniture? I won’t say I do it all the time, but I’ve switched my couch and my tv, or changed which wall the bed is against.
The lights are used for debugging and troubleshooting, mostly. My dad used to say that he could tell if a program was stuck in an infinite loop by watching the lights, although I would guess you would have to watch them forever to be sure it wasn’t just a very, very long loop.
Some info here:
Another death one from me:
People dying due to some kind of accident/injury will
a) authoritatively tell another character “No- I’m dying” if they try to administer first aid or call for help. I mean… lots of people think they’re going to die after they get hurt and they very often don’t. I can’t say it’s happened to me enough to know how they usually behave in terms of calmness and lucidity, but I would think it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s usually more “holy shit, I’m gonna die! Things hurt a lot! What is happening to me?” and less, “No child, I’m dying, come here and let me eloquently, if tearfully and haltingly, give you a poignant speech.”
b) … give that speech. And they’ll last just long enough for it and be lucid and conscious and able to put their thoughts together well enough to produce a beautiful, touching, heartfelt goodbye. Or they’ll get through ALMOST all of it and die just before the important part- “Oh Francesca, my opposite-sex best friend with whom I share a ton of chemistry and subtext! Don’t call an ambulance. I’m dying. Please don’t be sad without me. We had so many adventures together. Always be kind and healthy and rich. And I guess I should tell you… just before I go… Francesca O’Moony… lady of the mountains… keeper of the secrets… countess of the clink… the incredible hulk… the girl who sang the stars down from the skies… I always meant to tell you… Why didn’t I tell you earlier? …just remember that I… I… 
”
Cops or GIs in helicopters talking on the radio with handheld microphones and no headsets on. (McGarrett and Danno do this all the time on the old Hawaii Five-O.) The noise in those things is so bad, they could never hear anything (or be heard intelligibly on the other end).
I have a hard time listening to the radio in a car with the windows open unless I crank the volume up really high. In an open helicopter, I wouldn’t even try.
I remember the “open space” concept of the early 1970s, and when a neighborhood near the one I grew up in expanded and needed an elementary school, that’s how it was constructed. That concept didn’t last very long, and permanent walls were put in within a few years.
Oh, man, when I was a kid, my mother was constantly rearranging the living room furniture, and especially made a big production out of doing it when she was sick.
One day, I came home from school, saw that the furniture had been rearranged, and asked if she was sick. That nonsense stopped immediately.
My high school in Minneapolis was the same. My class was the first to go all three years (1970–73) in the new building. We also had “modular scheduling” to allow more options and flexibility.
Of course, both concepts were abused horribly, and the walls went up the year after I graduated. The last time I visited (in the mid-90s), it was still that way.
I, however, have the most credits of anyone who ever graduated from South High, since I took advantage of the modular scheduling to enroll in as many courses as I could. My record still stands, since modular scheduling was also cancelled in '74.