ddw (03/22/83)
The GE/Honeywell 635 that was installed at Dartmouth my first two years there
had this really groovy-looking I/O controller with hundreds of rapidly flashing
orange lights on it. Used to impress the hell out of visitors to the
computer center, as it was installed right next to the machine room windows.
During my junior year, this machine was replaced by a newer one with
no external lights, and some of the human interest went out of the place.
However, there were a few compensations; the indicator lights on the inside
of the CPU cabinets were a really sizzling red and looked very impressive.
In addition, the CPU idle loop was set up to rotate one set of lights
(the AQ register indicators) in a theater-marquee pattern. Unfortunately,
this wasn't visible unless you were in the machine room and opened the
cabinets.
A note related to Andy Tannenbaum's comments on terminal beepers: the
french-fry beepers at some fast-food placed also sound a lot like the
console alarm on Honeywell computer consoles. And the last thing you
need after a rough morning of debugging the system (during which it
crashed many times and set off the console alarm each time) is to hear
those beepers going off.
David Wright
{vax135|decvax|purdue}!cornell!ddw
ddw@cornell