Nowadays entire rooms full of kit could be ported to a Raspberry PI, no blinkenlights needed, but how do you charge a client big ticket money for that?
Easy. Just have some linux screens with lots of terminal windows running things like nmap, htop and the like.
We went from blinkenlights to The Matrix via Jurassic Park to get to this, and, nowadays, a room full of servers projects as much power as a cabinet full of HVAC equipment. Nobody is impressed.
Sometimes less was more. There were very accurate timekeeping clocks that cost tens of thousands but didn't even tell the time. The 1U unit would just have a power light, no clock. If you wanted to know the time then you would need a specialist clock that worked with the time signal that came out the back, or you would have to solder your own special MODEM lead and plug it into a laptop and TELNET in. This was not convenient if you just wanted to check if it was going home time yet.
Soldering this thing, however, was a challenge. It was basically 200 LEDs on a perfboard, the cathodes all connected by a continuous strip of non-isolated wire (I think I used paper clips for that), and the anodes all individually connected to the shift register output pins via flexible wires. It took me several weeks to finish this with a cheap 10 EUR soldering iron from my local hardware store, and it did not look nice from the back.
It worked very reliable, however, and I used it to display the time, the date and some small animations for some years.
> Transforming their dormitory building into a light show extravaganza, the students at Poland’s Wroclaw University of Technology demonstrated their tech-savvy skills with this large-scale installation of pixel-like flashes set to an equally animated soundtrack. Called “Projekt P.I.W.O.,” [Potężny Indeksowany Wyświetlacz Oknowy] (the acronym means “beer” in Polish), it’s simultaneously humorous and beautiful—particularly the Michael Jackson tribute about seven minutes in.
https://coolhunting.com/tech/light-show/
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potężny_Indeksowany_Wyświetlac...
[0] https://www.tindie.com/products/obso/pdp-11-replica-kit-the-...
Computers had such style then. It’s easy to see why we thought they would make the future so bright.
“My own adventure turned out to be quite different. I'm not like you, Bilbo."
At the individual node level, everything happens so fast there is no way a human could perceive those events.
I used to say in college that some of the things we saw (in EE) were so small and so short we needed instruments to know they actually happened (storage scopes, high-performance probes, etc). Even then, a lot of what we do was very abstract.
That must be in Southern German, ya?
Wise words to live by.