Orphaned Response - (nf)

[james at inmet.UUCP]

#R:sri-arpa:-69600:inmet:10300019:177600:1062
inmet!james    Jun  3 23:09:00 1984


Re: flashing lights.

This is one of my pet peeves.  It seems someone somewhere high in the
computer marketing cartel subscribed to by all manufacturers decided
that flashing lights are bad for us.  Why?????  The only reason I can
think of to eliminate them is cost, but how much would it add to the
cost of our IBM 3083 or VAX 780 to add a panel of lights- it would be
trivial.  With LED's nowadays you don't even incure any maintenance
cost.  Balance this with three important benefits:

	1-  It gives us techies the usually illusory feeling we know
             what the computer is doing.
	2-  It gives the corporate types who actually pay the bills
            something to show visiting firemen and relatives  on the
            obligatory tour of the computer room. I always feel a
            little embarassed when I show the President a large grey
            freezer chest, and say: "Yup, that's what we just spent
            X million dollars on."
	3-  Occasionly they actually really help debug flaky systems.

james triplett (...ima!inmet!james)