JargonFile/entries/blinkenlights.txt

blinkenlights

/blink'@nli:tz/ , n. [common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer,
esp. a dinosaur. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to
status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like. This term derives from
the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German
that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking
world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:
ACHTUNG!ALLESLOOKENSPEEPERS! Allestouristenundnon-technischenlookenpeepers!
Dascomputermachineistnichtfuergefingerpokenundmittengrabben.
Isteasyschnappenderspringenwerk,blowenfusenundpoppencorken
mitspitzensparken.Istnichtfuergewerkenbeidasdumpkopfen.
Dasrubberneckensichtseerenkeependascotten-pickenenhansindas
pocketsmuss;relaxenundwatchendasblinkenlichten. This silliness dates back at
least as far as 1955 at IBM and had already gone international by the early
1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site.
There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do
end with the word blinkenlights. In an amusing example of
turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed their own versions of
the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced
here: ATTENTION Thisroomisfullfilledmitspecialelectronischeequippment.
Fingergrabbingandpressingthecnoeppkesfromthecomputersis
allowedfordieexpertsonly!Soallthe lefthanders stayaway
anddonotdisturbenthebrainstormingvonhereworking
intelligencies.Otherwiseyouwillbeoutthrownandkicked
anderswhere!Also:pleasekeepstillandonlywatchenastaunished theblinkenlights.
See also geef. Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights
because they were so much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly,
very few computers still have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard
certainly don't count). The obvious reasons (cost of wiring, cost of
front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or wants to interpret
machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of the story.
Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp wiring was
beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines. But the most
fundamental fact is that there are very few signals slow enough to blink an
LED these days! With slow CPUs, you could watch the bus register or
instruction counter tick, but even at 33/66/150MHz (let alone gigahertz
speeds) it's all a blur. Despite this, a couple of relatively recent
computer designs of note have featured programmable blinkenlights that were
added just because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a
65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black
cube with one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo
had them evolving life patterns. A few years later the ill-fated BeBox (a
personal computer designed to run the BeOS operating system) featured twin
rows of blinkenlights on the case front. When Be, Inc. decided to get out of
the hardware business in 1996 and instead ported their OS to the PowerPC and
later to the Intel architecture, many users suffered severely from the
absence of their beloved blinkenlights. Before long an external version of
the blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available; there is some
sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was assembled by a German.
Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on
news.admin.net-abuse.