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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

Real computers have blinken lights. In an age of dull beige boxes, that’s what truly set them apart, at least to a layman.

I’m half joking, but half not. Nvidia, Cray, etc need to put some blinken lights on these drab racks. Something with AI needs lights, and it looks sexy to Joe Public.

Like in classic sci-fi, a sentient AI machine would have columns of blinken lights, tended to by women with clipboards, lab coats, and high heels.

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(Somewhat) funny story: My wife used to work at TMC and said that initally the blinken lights actually indicated the utilization of each CPU but programmers spent so much time entertaining themselves by writing code to do animations in the blinking light matrix that customers demanded ThinkingMachines do something about it. So they changed the lights to blink randomly.

When TM was at its peak, I heard comments from people in the DoD/intel community that the primary value of having a Thinking Machines computer was recruiting value. At least one company set one up in a very prominent place so that new developer recruits would see it and think the company was cutting edge. They rarely if ever actually developed on it because they found it just wasn't practical to write (or rewrite) code bases to take advantage of the parallel architecture. (and DARPA had paid for it, so it didnt actually cost the company that much).

There is part of one in the National Crypto Museum, though the lights are rigged for a slow pattern. I'm sure it's just a gutted case.

There's something awe-inspiring of big halls full of identical racks fitted with identical machines, with thick, even bundles of colourful network cables straining against their strips. Each unit -- of row, rack, server -- anonymously, but with great power, quietly (underneath the roar of the fans) grinding away on some unknown, ephemeral subpart of a workload. From a distance, clam and regular, serene, even; but as you get closer, plenty of blinking lights, on harddrives and NICs, feverishly and with no apparent pattern giving a small hint of the fierce activity taking place inside the cool metal box.

I've watched blinken lights on my motherboard for about 2 seconds when it performed automatic overclocking. POWER, CPU, DRAM, CPU, DRAM, CPU, DRAM, TPU, BOOT. Quite entertaining.

I've seen some PC motherboards that contained integrated "POST card" in the form of bunch of LEDs or pair of 7segment displays. Sadly this seems to got replaced by few highlevel LEDs and bunch of meaningless ones, which includes stuff like backlighted PCB.

By the way many DEC Alpha boards had large amount of LEDs near the CPU (probably driven directly by the CPU) which shown state of PALcode (and thus blinked in entertaining way even when the system is up and running)

I built an Altair 8080 clone, just so I could play Star Trek (CPM) and watch the lights blink. Too cool.

Have you not seen a DGX Station?

The purpose of those lights was to give a glimpse of the status of the machine - which cores were idling and which were not. The upper 16 LEDs of each board were doubled. I assume the extra ones were used for diagnostics.

If your computer lives in a datacenter, far from view, there is little purpose on them. If, however, it's a smaller unit that lives on a desk or in an office, being able to quickly tell its state is interesting. Good visualization is an art.

Not in person. I don’t see any blinken lights. Water cooled rigs and case lights don’t count.

Only slightly related, but imagine, if you take a huge server rack- and you insert hidden behind the front - a glas jar with a silicon-brain, into which tons of glowing wires run.

I want to hear the maintenance calls for that one.

Hey, this was marked as dead. Looks like you've been shadowbanned. Most of your recent comments look quite ok.

Best blinking light machine I ever saw was the Nanodata QM-1. More than a thousand LEDs. It had a program called 'tsq' which was short for 'Times Square' which would display a scrolling message.

The CM-1 LEDs were inspired when Hillis saw Wargames and the WOPR

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