Yes, I saw it when you posted a message about it to MoHPC.
A few years back I ran my Newtonsday [1] lights from a PERQ PERQlink
port. Just buffered the data output lines and fed them to LEDs. A bit of
pascal to produce the patterns and a bit of microcode to write values to
the port completed the project.
Somewhat more recently I wrote a Datafile (HPCC club magazine) article of
HP calculator controled Nwetonsday lights, using either an HP41 + HPIL +
GPIO interface or an HP48 + ARD's I2C interface. HPCC can probably
provide copies of that article for anyone who's mad enough to want to try it.
I also know of somebody who patched RT11 to write the idle lights display
not to the switch register address but to the address of a 'spare' DR11
card. The output of that was buffered and used to flash 16 LEDs aranged
in sone tinsel around the top of the rack.
[1] As an agnostic I see no particular reason to celebrate Christmas. As
a physicist I see a good reason to celebrate the birthday of Sir Isaac
Newton. He was born 25/12/1642
-tony