On Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:12:36 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

> On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Apr 2018 11:28:27 +0000 (UTC)) it happened
> Martin Gregorie  wrote in
> :
>
>>On Tue, 17 Apr 2018 07:17:01 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>
>>> But the word 'blinkenlights' is new to me, I am in different language
>>> country. Seems to be German-English ?? 'blinken' and 'lights'.
>>>
>>Its all a bit of silliness that traces back to a notice that got spread
>>around and was typically stuck to a computer-room window that let those
>>passing by in the corridor see what was going on in there.
>>
>>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
>>
>>is a reasonable description and gives the text of the most common
>>version.
>>
>>In my uni the computer was an Elliott 503 (early scientific machine from
>>discrete transistors and ferrite core memory) and the notice on the
>>window was a drawing of a head with 3-4 cubes drawn in the brain area
>>and the caption "Quiet! I'm playing with my mental blocks".
>
> Thank you, nice movie on that wikipedia site.
> Interesting how my brain starts to try to decode the lights
> immediately...

Mine doesn't, but then I never used anything with a light show, so have
never needed to read such things.

The Elliott 503 had an engineering panel about the size of a smallish
drawing board that was liberally covered in red lamps, but it was purely
for the engineer - nobody I knew understood it and it was only plugged in
if the engineers were around. Like an 1900 mainframe, its operators used
a control typewriter.

1900 mainframes didn't have blinkenlights at all, though there was a 24
lamp engineering display with a set of perspex masks that labelled the
lamps - each mask matched a different socket in the CPU cabinet. Anything
else would have been superfluous because the machine only had two
hardware registers, which pointed to the datum and limit addresses for
the running program. Everything else of significance (the 8 accumulators,
PC and CC, i.e. all 10 registers, were the first 10 words in every
program and no, there was no SP register because it was a stackless
architecture.

Everything else I've programmed has, like the ICL 1900s, also showed a
total lack of blinkenlights.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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