On 9/23/22 11:53, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
On Sep 23, 2022, at 12:45 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk@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.
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
