beige rant (was Re: IBM 5150 with red case on ebay)

[Swift Griggs]

On Sat, 14 May 2016, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove wrote:
> Blue? That's so pass?! Right now the popularity is to go full *RAINBOW!* 
> with the RGB LEDs...

It's wrong and a crime against nature. I hate that kind of flea market 
bait.

> Though yeah, intense blue is getting just a bit annoying; though I admit 
> I'd love to see a DECdatasystem-570 version of the PDP-11/70 panel (i.e. 
> "the blue one") with blue LEDs instead of the standard red; or bright 
> white. If only because those colours would fit.

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). Then there's vue-meters. Folks, we need more excuses 
to add them everywhere... metal ones with beautiful backlight displays 
etc.. Power is a good enough excuse. We need to monitor that, right?

-Swift