14 May
2016
14 May
'16
10:30 a.m.
On 05/13/2016 10:27 PM, Swift Griggs wrote:
They would, and I agree that it'd be neat-looking
to the right
observer. It's interesting to compare the modern blinkenlights in
datacenters to the flippers and diagnostic LEDs, component LEDs, and
even SGI's front panel CPU graphs. My favorite era of "really cool
display tech" was FL displays that were really popular in the late
70's and all of the 80's. Old spectrum analyzers and things like that
could be very classy and slick looking (even today).
It seems that a number of the retro folks are fascinated by the
7-segment displays on cheap Taiwanese cases of the 80s and early 90s
that can be made to display any number that you care to see, regardless
of actual CPU clock speed (mine were set to display "Lo" and "Hi".
Then there's the oscope tuning display on the Marantz 10B tuner. So eye
candy has been with us for a long time. Note that the "look" back then
was a brushed aluminum panel with matching knobs. Everyone had it.
--Chuck