Exploring a 1950s space ship

[Hand of Evil]

Blinking lights. Lots of blinking lights.

Toggles, switched, and dials too.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Blinking lights. Lots of blinking lights.

Believe it or not, the term is "blinkenlights." That term dates back to at least 1955, where it showed up on a completely serious and aboveboard sign in many computer rooms:

ACHTUNG!
ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENSPEEPERS!
DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKEN.
IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.​

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

I printed my first copy of the Jargon File on 132 column green bar fan fold paper, so yeah.

 

[RealAlHazred]

I printed my first copy of the Jargon File on 132 column green bar fan fold paper, so yeah.

Back in the day (the 90s, sometime), one of my friends did code troubleshooting for some IBM mainframe systems. One customer he went to, he found that there were a few test accounts still enabled; this is bad security, so, per policy at the time, he disabled them. The customer called back the next week and he went back to see what he had messed up.

He gets there and is shuffled into a meeting with a manager, one of the senior users, and another user who's nervously fidgeting in his chair.

"The Green Report isn't being run," said the manager.

"What's that?" asks my friend.

Turns out the Green Report is a large report the system generates every Friday, amounting to several reams of wide-format fan-fold green-lined paper. The nervous guy's job is to keep the paper hopper filled up, and then distribute the reports to various executives -- one copy to the President's office, another to the CFO, etc.

"I can regenerate the queries and the report. What's in it?" asks my friend.

"You know, I'm not sure," says the manager, turning to Nervous Ned.

"I don't know," says Nervous Ned, "it always looks like it's got tons of data."

"Just get the Green Report running again, please," says the manager, and the meeting is over.

My friend digs into the code, and figures it out. It seems that, early on, the guys setting the system up set up a debug printout. It would generate huge amounts of paper documenting the contents of various indexes and registers in the system, and it was run by one of the test accounts. They must have figured that the test accounts would be disabled as the last step of setup and the report would stop generating. My friend figured that might have been right around the time ten years earlier that there was a shakeup in the technical department -- somebody died, other people got fired, it was a mess. But they must have had the system to "almost done" standards and management at my friend's company decided it was good enough.

How the customer decided it was "the Green Report" and came up with elaborate procedures to send copies to various executives and departments is anybody's guess. Thinking about it now, I can absolutely see it happening -- some slightly-technical executive asks to be given the report so they can figure it out. A rival executive insists that he also wants a copy. Somebody else who mediates their exchange gets one as well. And so on.

But the upshot was, due to various cutbacks at the customer, Nervous Ned's only remaining job was to bind up and send out several copies of the Green Report to important execs. Which was now determined to be superfluous. And how many forests were cut down so they could run the Green Report?

 

[aramis erak]

The cruiser in forbidden planet nuwt have had a computer, they looked up morbius quick abd something told they they were being scanned from. Altair 4.

The lack of computer room does NOT axiomatically mean the lack of a computer. Not a few SF writers (accurately) predicted shrinking computer sizes and integration. Die Blinkenlights braughen keinen Raum.

Flash Gordon, in the early serials, assumed computers built into the consoles featurning Die Blinkenlights. The consoles are big, but the computer seems distributed into the (oversized for the era) consoles.

Forbidden planet, we don't see enough to rule out a computer room, but we don't need one anyway, as the consoles seem already computerized.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Has This Island Earth (1955) been mentioned yet? Also The Quatermass Experiment (TV 1953, movie 1955).

Comics: Dan Dare (Eagle) 1950-1967.

No visuals, but Journey into Space - BBC radio plays from the 1950s by Charles Chilton. If you can get the BBC you can probably still listen to them.

 

[Hand of Evil]

You know, Inkwell Designs may have something that may help, been awhile since I checked them out but they had card deck on a bunch of stuff.

 

[ART!]

Lots of guages, most of them quite large, with green zones on the left and red zones on the right, so you can tell when things are serious. Also, each guage has a quavering needle so that things look very busy!

 

[Hand of Evil]

Lots of guages, most of them quite large, with green zones on the left and red zones on the right, so you can tell when things are serious. Also, each guage has a quavering needle so that things look very busy!

Oscilloscopes

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Oscilloscopes

Oh yes. Which do nothing but display Lissajous figures.