Canon EOS 5D
ƒ/4
28 mm
1/25
400

A newborn baby fixates on human faces… but a newborn boy will turn his gaze to blinking lights.

Stereo equipment designers have exploited this innate attraction for years. =)

And in this full size photo, you can appreciate IBM’s pinnacle of geek bling-bling – an immersive widescreen of blinky bliss.

This IBM System/360 Model 91 was a scientific computer used at SLAC in 1968. It used Solid Logic Technology (modules of five to six transistors) during the transition period between discrete transistors and the IC.

16 responses to “Atavistic Computing”

  1. splorp Avatar
    splorp

    A beautiful thing to behold. Blinky bliss, indeed.

    Reply
  2. drona Avatar
    drona

    You are baiting us to date ourselves, aren’t you?! 🙂 This boy has fixated on these for decades. There were programming freaks who would program the lights to do animations and such.

    Computing Wars:
    If some Indian history be revealed: The US Govt. donated one IBM 360 computers to IIT Kanpur and one to IIT Madras in the early seventies and this generated 15 graduating years of students in India who grew up programming these computers till the mid 80s.. The Soviet Union which had partnered with IIT Bombay decided to donate the EC 1030 around the same circa which led to several graduating years of students who’d learned the Soviet style of computing. Around the mid 80s the Govt started importing PDP and DEC 10 and DEC 20 computers into research institutions in Bombay. The Soviets couldn’t keep up anymore…besides who wanted to program punching paper tape and card decks. It was a lot easier typing the code into the VT100 CRTs.

    Reply
  3. Todd Huffman Avatar
    Todd Huffman

    Oh the Shiny Blinky! I *love* the Shiny Blinky.

    The Inner Monkey is strong in this one.

    Reply
  4. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    We love the blinky as much as we love Binky the clown…. Just one "L" afar.

    Reply
  5. Automatt Avatar
    Automatt

    We would always move the machines with the blinky lights closer to the glass windows of the computer center — so that the journalists and customers could see ’em blinking away. Wheee!

    My fave blinkys were on the convex exemplar machines before HP bought them out. Their individually addressable chaser lights are along the edges of the machines on three sides.

    Reply
  6. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    awesome stuff. Let’s not forget the Connection Machine… a pointillist art form…

    Reply
  7. andyi Avatar
    andyi

    Why must modern PCs be such static objects? Wouldn’t it be great if they displayed Rorschache-like patterns on a dedicated little LCD screen?

    You wouldn’t know what any of the dots actually meant, but after having it in your peripheral vision day after day, you’d soon think "Omigod…every time there’s the blotch that looks like two elk eating a Big Mac on a skateboard, the system crashes ten minutes later!"

    And then you’d explain the problem to a tech-support guy and he’d say that clearly the problem with the PC is an unseated CPU and the problem with you is a nonlocalized abandonment-associative complex.

    Reply
  8. Telstar Logistics Avatar
    Telstar Logistics

    Love this. And, of course, the primal blinky attraction is entirely what animates my ongoing media rack project in our living room:

    Blinky Bliss

    Living with this turns out to be deeply satisfying. I’m no longer a newborn baby, but I still want the blinky lights in my crib. Is that so wrong?

    Reply
  9. sharl Avatar
    sharl

    So why else do you think we built this:

    We were just a bunch of boys, hypnotised by the blinking lights..

    Reply
  10. fotogail Avatar
    fotogail

    we are all blinking children of ENIAC

    Reply
  11. Stewf Avatar
    Stewf

    ooooo

    Reply
  12. oliwier Avatar
    oliwier

    WordMingle, a social vocabulary building tool, pulled this picture for the word innate

    Reply
  13. towert7 Avatar
    towert7

    OH my goodness, that is so amazing!
    What a great find you have there. I can not even begin to imagine what it would look like powered up.

    Reply
  14. madrigar Avatar
    madrigar

    Boy, you sure had to be up on your binary back in those days…

    Reply
  15. Yandle Avatar
    Yandle

    Have you counted how many switches there are?

    Reply
  16. Railgap Esoterica Avatar
    Railgap Esoterica

    I used to run IBM 360-75’s in the USAF. The operator console of the -75 is only slightly smaller and less complex than the 90 series.

    Reply

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