23 Sep
2022
23 Sep
'22
11:38 p.m.
I think the computers got so fast so that having blinking light wasn’t feasible. They
would be on all the time.
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 23, 2022, at 16:27, Jon Elson via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 9/23/22 11:53, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
Those are good examples, but is it "many" or just those two and maybe
one or two more? For example, Burroughs and IBM mainframes were both very much
"lights and switches" control panel type machines. For that matter, so were the
other CDC products; the 6000 series was a bit of an outlier I think.
Blinky light front panels went mostly out of style on later machines. The 360/85
(prototype of the 370/165) went to a scheme with a lamp panel projected onto a microfiche
viewer that combined legends from the fiche with the lamp image. Turning knobs to select
a different fiche page brought up different signals to the lamps. This was a stark
departure from the IBM Model 195 panel, which was seriously over the top! You needed a
road atlas to even FIND the indicator you wanted to look at!
The VAX 11/780 had no panel, just four indicators and a key switch. The console driven
by an LSI-11 was pretty powerful, though. The KL10B used a PDP-11 as the console and to
interface non-MassBus peripherals.
As for the defense maps, they really DID exist. Our university had some bits of SAGE,
and one of the things was the big map projector. The way the thing worked was a small CRT
was projected onto movie film, the film ran through a developer, and then was projected
onto a large screen. I don't know what the delay for film processing was, but it must
have been 30 seconds or so.
Jon
On Sep
23, 2022, at 12:45 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 9/22/22 22:56, ben via cctalk wrote:
Blinking lights tended to be for computers of the
future.
World maps with lights where nuclear missiles could strike
seem to be movie props only.
I thought it curious that many 1960s-1970s supercomputers lacked front
panels and blinking lights altogether. (e.g. Cray I, CDC
Cyber/600/700, etc.) Indeed, the Cray couldn't even spin a tape without
help from another system doing the I/O.