From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!cornell!hal Newsgroups: net.movies Title: Re: computers in the movies - (nf) Article-I.D.: cornell.4097 Posted: Sat Mar 12 16:01:23 1983 Received: Sun Mar 13 10:44:00 1983 References: tekmdp.1806 The 360s did have reasonably impressive consoles, but I'd like to nominate a couple of others for having more impressive displays. First, the 360/195-370/195. These were very fast processors for scientific work. The older ones had a light bay about 3 times the size of a normal 360 console with lights for most of the major logic gates in the processor. Very impressive looking. The Burroughs 6700 also had a slick display. This was a dual processor machine in its basic configuration. Each processor had a big display showing all the processor registers and major flip-flops. When the processor was put in an idle loop by the operating system waiting for an interrupt, the registers were loaded with the appropriate bit pattern to display a big Burroughs "B" in the lights. Finally, I've only been told stories about this one, but I did hear about it from folks who had first hand knowledge. At one of the big Air Force bases outside Phoenix there was an old tube computer that did a lot of real-time processing for the air defense system. Attached to each logic line in the system was a small nixie lamp. These lights were arrayed on a very large display (at least 12 feet wide and maybe 5 feet tall), and the thousands of lights created quite a display. This machine was apparently very easy to service because there wasn't any need to stick logic probes into it to find out the problem--one only had to go look at the lights. I'm told that this monster was still installed in the mid 70s. I'm also told that on occasion, some very stoned Air Force people would pass their time sitting in a trance in front of the blinking lights. Hal Perkins