Blinkenlights is a hacker's
neologismA neologism ; from Greek νές is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event...
for diagnostic lights on old
mainframeMainframes are computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term probably had originated from the early mainframes, as...
computers and modern
networkA computer network is a group of interconnected computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics. This article provides a general overview of some types and categories and also presents the basic components of a network....
hardwareHardware is a general term for the physical artifacts of a technology. It may also mean the physical components of a computer system, in the form of computer hardware....
.
The
Jargon FileThe Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab , and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University,...
provides the following
etymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
:
Although the sign might initially appear to be in German and uses an approximation of German grammar, it is composed largely of words that are either near-homonyms of English words or (in the cases of the longer words) actual English words that are rendered in a faux-German spelling.
Blinkenlights is a hacker's
neologismA neologism ; from Greek νές is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event...
for diagnostic lights on old
mainframeMainframes are computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term probably had originated from the early mainframes, as...
computers and modern
networkA computer network is a group of interconnected computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics. This article provides a general overview of some types and categories and also presents the basic components of a network....
hardwareHardware is a general term for the physical artifacts of a technology. It may also mean the physical components of a computer system, in the form of computer hardware....
.
The
Jargon FileThe Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab , and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University,...
provides the following
etymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
:
Although the sign might initially appear to be in German and uses an approximation of German grammar, it is composed largely of words that are either near-homonyms of English words or (in the cases of the longer words) actual English words that are rendered in a faux-German spelling. As such, the sign is generally comprehensible by many English speakers regardless of whether they have any fluency in German. Much of the humor in these signs was their intentionally incorrect language.
The sign is also reported to have been seen on an
Electron microscopeAn electron microscope is a type of microscope, a scientific instrument which is used to magnify things on a fine scale. That uses a particle beam of electrons to illuminate a specimen and create a highly-magnified image...
at the
Cavendish LaboratoryThe Cavendish Laboratory is the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory and was initially located on the New Museums Site, Free School Lane, in the centre of Cambridge. After...
in the 1950s. Such pseudo-German parodies were common in
AlliedIn general, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose. In English usage, those who share a common goal and whose work toward that goal is complementary may be viewed as allies for various purposes even when...
machine shops during and following
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and an example photocopy is shown in the
Jargon File.
The
Jargon File also mentions that German hackers have developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster, in fractured English:
Actual blinkenlights
With dramatically rising
CPU frequenciesThe clock rate is the fundamental rate in cycles per second for the frequency of the clock in any synchronous circuit. For example, a crystal oscillator frequency reference typically is synonymous with a fixed sinusoidal waveform, a clock rate is that frequency reference translated by electronic...
in computer processors, the traditional front-panel "blinkenlights" soon became useless for watching to monitor computations and diagnose software bugs. Still, they remain useful for indicators of power on/off status and hard-disk usage on most personal computers. There are a number of other notable later uses of blinking lights in computers, as well.
The
Connection MachineThe Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
, a 65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black cube with one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo had them evolving
Conway's Game of LifeThe Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton....
patterns.
The
CPUThe Central Processing Unit or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s...
load monitors on the front of
BeBoxThe BeBox was a dual processor computer, offered by Be Inc. to run the company's own operating system, BeOS. Notable aspects of the system include its CPU configuration, I/O Board with "GeekPort", and "Blinkenlights" on the front bezel....
es were also called “blinkenlights”.
This word gave its name to several projects, including screen savers, hardware gadgets, and other nostalgic things. Some notable enterprises include
Project BlinkenlightsProject Blinkenlights was a light installation in the Haus des Lehrers building at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin that transformed the building front into a giant low-resolution monochrome computer screen. The installation was created by the German Chaos Computer Club in 2001 as a celebration of its...
and the
Blinkenlights Archaeological InstituteThe Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute was established in 1997 to preserve historical computing devices. Its headquarters are in Seattle, Washington, USA...
.
Many
DellDell, Inc. develops, manufactures, sells, and supports personal computers and other computer-related products. Based in Round Rock, Texas, Dell employs more than 76,500 people worldwide ....
computers have a set of blinkenlights near the PS/2 keyboard plug or rear USB ports (for desktops), or on the front fascia (for servers). It is a set of four bi-color lights for diagnostic purposes (e.g., video card failure, memory failure, etc.).
EthernetEthernet is a family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks . The name comes from the physical concept of the ether...
NICNIC may refer to:Banking and Insurance* NIC, National Insurance Company Limited, the leading Insurance Company in Pakistan* NIC, National Insurance Corporation Limited, the leading provider of insurance and risk management services in Uganda...
s, external
modemModem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s, and similar devices generally have at least a pair of blinkenlights indicating data being sent and received. Older modems from the 1990s had seven or so blinkenlights on the front, indicating
stateIn computer science and automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine. It is a concept that occasionally extends into some forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers....
such as whether the phone was on or off the hook and whether a
carrierCarrier may refer to:In Science:* Carrier wave, a waveform suitable for modulation by an information-bearing signal* Charge carrier, an unbound particle carrying an electric charge* a mathematical Set over which a Boolean algebra is defined...
signal was detected on the line.
External links