We had a 6700 at the Toronto Burroughs office as well, displaying the Burroughs logo; when it was sold/leased to the Metropolitan police they changed it to display the police logo. An impressive panel of lights, to be sure.
On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 2:16 PM Paul Koning via cctalk < [email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Sep 12, 2025, at 10:00 AM, donald donaldwhittemore.com via cctalk < > [email protected]> wrote: > > > > You want blinky lights? Try this. 😊 > > > > https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ca/jpgs/195_engineers_console.jpg > > Or this: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation#/media/File:MoMA_Exhibition,_CM-2_(38801396912)_(clip1).jpg > > That's probably one of the most recent machines with significant lights on > it. > > Speaking of neat "idle" lights patterns, I still remember the one on a > Burroughs 6700 mainframe at TU Eindhoven. It had a panel full of lights, > not quite 195 sized but still large. When idle, those lights would show > the Burroughs logo, about a foot tall. > > My favorite example for the other extreme is the CDC 6000 series > mainframes, with no lights at all -- but instead a vector text display > refreshed by a dedicated processor, allowing it to show the system state > Right Now. Nothing like it for being able to judge changing vs. frozen > state anywhere in the system -- process state, any memory you wanted to > see, I/O channel status -- all refreshed 30x times per second or so. Also > a nice example of doing much with little memory: the controlling processor > was a 12 bit machine with 4k words of memory. > > paul
