We had a 6700 at the Toronto Burroughs office as well, displaying the
Burroughs logo; when it was sold/leased to the Metropolitan police they
changed it to display the police logo. An impressive panel of lights, to be
sure.
On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 2:16 PM Paul Koning via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sep 12, 2025, at 10:00 AM, donald
donaldwhittemore.com via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Or this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation#/media/File:MoM…
That's probably one of the most recent machines with significant lights on
it.
Speaking of neat "idle" lights patterns, I still remember the one on a
Burroughs 6700 mainframe at TU Eindhoven. It had a panel full of lights,
not quite 195 sized but still large. When idle, those lights would show
the Burroughs logo, about a foot tall.
My favorite example for the other extreme is the CDC 6000 series
mainframes, with no lights at all -- but instead a vector text display
refreshed by a dedicated processor, allowing it to show the system state
Right Now. Nothing like it for being able to judge changing vs. frozen
state anywhere in the system -- process state, any memory you wanted to
see, I/O channel status -- all refreshed 30x times per second or so. Also
a nice example of doing much with little memory: the controlling processor
was a 12 bit machine with 4k words of memory.
paul