Why are people fascinated by blilnking lights in Science Fiction Movies, Tv Shows

I would like to know everyone's opinions about why people are fascinated by blinking and flashing lights in real life, tv shows and
science fiction tv shows and science fiction movies? I think that it's mesmerising and that might be why people are fascinated or attracted by blinking lights. I wonder if a blinking light is used in hypnosis a lot. I would like to know everybody's opinions about this. And also, during certian holidays especially during Christmas, all of the businesses put up blinking lights and sell them for Christmas Trees and houses. Why are blinking lights so popular?

[GrnMtSkeptic]

Quote:

Originally posted by Ian
I would like to know everyone's opinions about why people are fascinated by blinking and flashing lights in real life, tv shows and
science fiction tv shows and science fiction movies? I think that it's mesmerising and that might be why people are fascinated or attracted by blinking lights. I wonder if a blinking light is used in hypnosis a lot. I would like to know everybody's opinions about this. And also, during certian holidays especially during Christmas, all of the businesses put up blinking lights and sell them for Christmas Trees and houses. Why are blinking lights so popular?

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People like lights. That's why they are so blinking popular. Oh wait, never mind.

I'm not sure, but my favorite blinking light in a sci fi movie was the construction flasher with a bobber taped to it on the desk in the saucer in "Plan 9". Yeah, so it wasn't actually blinking, but it could have.

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[Loon]

Blinking lights!!!!!!
YAY!

[Atlas]

Change is eye catching. It's that simple.

Those blinking lights are used in real life for warnings and decoration - not just movies and Christmas trees.

[Soapy Sam]

Machines make noise when they do things.
In movies, background noise is often removed (or non-existent on a set) so the dialogue is audible or the exciting soundtrack (available on a separate CD) can be heard.

The blinking lights are there to make it look the all the high tech machinery is doing something.

It's a cheap effect. . A bit like smileys.

[CFLarsen]

Quote:

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
The blinking lights are there to make it look the all the high tech machinery is doing something.

People's perception of big computers is very different from what they are in real life, because of this. In real life, big computers are simply big boxes with no - or very few - blinking lights. It's the most mindnumbingly boring sight to see.

But you can't show that in the movies, so you got to jazz it up a bit.

I always laugh when I watch "Wargames".

[Soapy Sam]

I think that was the one where they realised a spotty sixteen year old typing like crazy maketh not rivetting viewing.

Which is why they put Sandra Bullock in that other one.
Not the most believable nerd, but who cared?

[Ladewig]

But the very best was the control room on the "Seaview" (the futuristic submarine in Irwin Allen's "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea")
Hundreds of unlabeled lights

.......................
Club chairs, standing ashtrays, and shag carpeting - did someone call MTV's "Pimp my Sub"?

[Mojo]

Quote:

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
The blinking lights are there to make it look the all the high tech machinery is doing something.

"The lights keep flashing out of sequence. What should we do?"

"Get them to flash in sequence." - William Shatner in Airplane II.

[Jeff Corey]

As Atlas said, changing stimuli are more salient. The state highway department has added flashing white strobe lights to the red stop lights at dangerous intersections over the past few years.

[Hellbound]

Quote:

Originally posted by Ladewig
But the very best was the control room on the "Seaview" (the futuristic submarine in Irwin Allen's "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea")
Hundreds of unlabeled lights

.......................
Club chairs, standing ashtrays, and shag carpeting - did someone call MTV's "Pimp my Sub"?

Remember the Alien movie? Can't remember which it was, but I think the first one. The computer room had row upon row of lights, covering the floor, ceiling, and all the walls, probably well over a few thousand of them... and none of them labelled!

That's one computer I would not like to do helpdesk support for.

[TheBoyPaj]

Quote:

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
I think that was the one where they realised a spotty sixteen year old typing like crazy maketh not rivetting viewing.

Not just typing. He also read out loud what he was typing, even when there was no one else in the room. Because we all do that, don't we? I know I did while writing this post.

[thatguywhojuggles]

What would always amuse me is the way they present computers in movies (especially back in the 80s.) Whenever someone would get on a computer it would make all kinds of beeping noises everytime something came up on the screen. I would always think, "if my computer beeped that much I would toss it out the window!"

[Iamme]

Quote:

Originally posted by CFLarsen
People's perception of big computers is very different from what they are in real life, because of this. In real life, big computers are simply big boxes with no - or very few - blinking lights. It's the most mindnumbingly boring sight to see.

But you can't show that in the movies, so you got to jazz it up a bit.

I always laugh when I watch "Wargames".

I believe there was an old tv show from the late 60's called The Time Tunnel. I believe it starred the dad from the old show called Lost in Space (You know; Dr. Smith, Will, and that robot). Well, shows like this often showed big control boards with all these blinking lights.

But do you mean to tell me that in real, there are not control panels with these flashing, blinking lights? I kinda thought that , say, a nuclear power plant's main control panel had all this stuff...for real. Or, say, on submarines. Does anyone know the truth on this?

[Iamme]

I just noticed something. Ian's starter thread typing is blinking. Read it once. His "blinking" must have been blinking.

[alfaniner]

I used to work on one in the 70's, a Univac I think, called a CP-808. Well, ok, I pressed the button that read in the punched paper tape reel.

The computer was an upright monster taller than me that had rows of little button lights that scrolled in a pattern across the array. I don't recall the individual lights being labelled, but perhaps the rows and columns were. One thing we figured out to do when we were bored was to change the scrolling light pattern. In retrospect, perhaps that's why our programmers were having so many problems...

[IIRichard]

Quote:

Originally posted by alfaniner
I used to work on one in the 70's, a Univac I think, called a CP-808. Well, ok, I pressed the button that read in the punched paper tape reel.

The computer was an upright monster taller than me that had rows of little button lights that scrolled in a pattern across the array. I don't recall the individual lights being labelled, but perhaps the rows and columns were. One thing we figured out to do when we were bored was to change the scrolling light pattern. In retrospect, perhaps that's why our programmers were having so many problems...

In the sixties (Yeah, I'm that old) computers did have a lot of lights, mostly blinking. Most of them showed the status of various registers or the activity, or lack thereof, in one of the modules of the CPU, not a single chip then. Also status of input output etc. There weren't any monitors then and the output was usually a printer that only printed when the batch job was finished or a puch card machine.

One computer that I personally never worked with had a speaker that clicked and clattered as the program ran. If it wnet to a single monotone, the program had entered an endless loop. The program had to be stopped and rewritten to get rid of the loop. Your keyboard probably still has a "pause/break" key on it.

In summary, blinking lights, changing tones = program running. Unblinking lights, monotone from speaker = program crashed.

So, all the early sci-fi movies had a lot of lights on the computers. Sci-Fi computers still have a lot of blinking lights,
Come to think of it, I can see about six LED's from where I sit at this computer.

IIRichard

[Psiload]

Why are people so fasc... ohh... science movies... ahhh.... what was the question again?



Ohhh pretty lights.

[Ossai]

CFLarsen

Quote:

People's perception of big computers is very different from what they are in real life, because of this. In real life, big computers are simply big boxes with no - or very few - blinking lights. It's the most mindnumbingly boring sight to see.

Hey! We’ve (the place I work) have an IBM Shark, complete with fin.

Iamme

Quote:

I believe there was an old tv show from the late 60's called The Time Tunnel. I believe it starred the dad from the old show called Lost in Space (You know; Dr. Smith, Will, and that robot). Well, shows like this often showed big control boards with all these blinking lights.

The old Irwin Allen TV shoes (Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), and some of his early movies often recycled costumes, sets, people, scripts, and anything else he though he could. Basically blinking lights are cheap.

Ossai.

I was at the Franklin Institute yesterday and I saw from outside the glass at the Imax Theater where they put the magnetic tape around these huge wheels and it had one or two blinking lights on the computer and inside where the staff worked in the theater itself, there were a lot of lights and I don't know whether or not they blinked. Some huge computers probably have a few blinking lights but not as many as they had in the 1960s.

[Zep]

I've got a warehouse-full of old blinken-light machines, and I worked on them too. Even the early machines in the 1950's ran way faster than the front-panel lights could react to change in register contents, etc. The rise-time and fall-time for incandescant globes is orders of magnitude too slow. Otherwise they would be "on" all the time. The light circuitery simply sampled the registers at sufficient intervals to allow them to turn on and off noticeable to the human eye.

The reality is that the lights were there pretty much for sales purposes - to impress the paying client management. Since computers then were huge, pulled lots of power, and cost literally millions of dollars each, the client managers especially wanted to see them do something for all those bucks they shelled out. Making the lights blink was the easiest and the most impressive thing to do. As Claus pointed out - mostly computers were just a maze of huge grey or blue boxes throwing the bits about. Dull. As. Ditchwater.

IBM example.

[alfaniner]

Personally, I'd like a little blinking light when my hard drive is being accessed. I've had so many freeze-ups since getting Windows XP it would be nice to have some feedback as to whether the computer is actually doing something.

[alfaniner]

Now I know why Spongebob Squarepants looks so familiar. He reminds me of the old tape drives I used to work with!

[CBL4]

To expand on what IIRichard said, the lights were used for debugging. On some models, it was possible to single step through a programs and see the change in a register value. On other computers, certain lights gave status of certain devices.

A frequent debugging technique was to turn on a different light at certain stages in program execution. When the computer hung (yes this happened pre-Microsoft), you could tell how far it had gotten.

This type of thing is still used on a lot of circuit boards during development and sometimes in the final product. A blinking green light is good news and a solid red light is bad. Any other output affects performance too much to be a reliable testing tool.

In fact, I am fighting this type of problem at this very moment. [work related rant/]The &*$&@# program is not running and anything I do to test it changes the way it runs. I am using the equivalent of light to debug. I still think we could have found a way to get trace on the board.[/work related rant]

CBL

[Jyera]

Blinking light for Christmas decoration might mean double the effectiveness with half the cost in electricity.

[Dredred]

Quote:

Originally posted by Ian
I wonder if a blinking light is used in hypnosis a lot.

<center><font size=4 color=yellow><blink>YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY</blink></font>
</center>

[malaka]

From Computerworld's Shark Tank:

Quote:

As long as the boss is happy



Big defense contractor buys a small company, and the small company gets a new IT boss just as work starts to integrate systems with the big outfit's infrastructure, reports a pilot fish on the scene.
And though the new boss has no computer skills or knowledge, she's still the source of a steady stream of instructions for renovating the data center.

"This initially included installing a window into the data center," says fish. "She wanted to be able to see into it as she walked in every morning and at every smoke break.

"It seemed strange, but I was happy if that meant I could keep her from actually coming into the data center and possibly destroying something."

A week or two later, boss tells fish to install track lighting over each row of servers lining the room. Then she requests dimmer switches to control the track lighting.

"Weird assignments kept rolling in -- knock out a wall here, paint a wall there, change the colors of the electrical outlet covers -- while I labored with co-workers to get the real work done," fish says. "Meanwhile, I endured daily meetings with corporate managers to describe and explain any and all progress made from the previous day's labors."

Then comes a major project: replacing the aging network switches. "The Friday before we began, I let the boss know what we had assigned to us," says fish. "She nearly had a cow. She immediately started calling everyone she knew at company headquarters, ranting and raving that this would be way too disruptive to the users and cause general havoc."

The project is pushed back two weeks, but then rescheduled. That Friday, boss tells fish not to make any changes, no matter what.

"It was then that I finally got the real reason for why she wanted the blinking switches to stay," fish says. "She loved walking by several times a day and looking through the window in the data center to see the pretty green blinking lights.

"That made her feel everything inside the data center was working well. The green activity lights let her know there were no problems, or they would have started blinking amber or red.

"After our little talk, I spoke with our corporate folks and was told in no uncertain terms that if this project wasn't done that weekend, I would face serious consequences. I told them not to worry: It would be done by Monday morning."

Over the weekend, fish and a co-worker make the changes and remove the switches. But they leave the old switch racks in place. "We installed random-blinking green Christmas lights where the switches used to sit behind the smoked glass doors," he says.

"To this day, my boss still thinks she won the battle to keep the blinking switches in place."

[c4ts]

Blinking lights offend people with epilepsy.