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