Million Dollar Lights
Control console of the IBM "Stretch" mainframe at Lawrence Livermore in 1961.
A friend who worked with old mainframes once told me that the lights covering those control panels were nicknamed "million dollar lights." He said that most of them don't really do much of use, but when the client paid a million dollars for a calculating machine they wanted something to look at which told them it was actually doing something besides consuming enormous amounts of money. They could look at the panel of lights blinking in complex patterns and think to themselves, "Yup. I'm getting my money out of this thing." The more you paid for the computer system, the more blinky lights you got.
A friend who worked with old mainframes once told me that the lights covering those control panels were nicknamed "million dollar lights." He said that most of them don't really do much of use, but when the client paid a million dollars for a calculating machine they wanted something to look at which told them it was actually doing something besides consuming enormous amounts of money. They could look at the panel of lights blinking in complex patterns and think to themselves, "Yup. I'm getting my money out of this thing." The more you paid for the computer system, the more blinky lights you got.
posted by Jar(egg)head at 15:26
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