I have fond memories of soldering my own small Blinkenlight, a BlinkenLED, around 2005 as a kid. This was before the Raspberry Pi was around - it was just a 10x20 LED matrix controlled by 20 shift registers [0], connected to the serial port of an old DOS laptop. I remember that it was trivial to shift the individual bits through the serial port with a small BASIC program.

Soldering this thing, however, was a challenge. It was basically 200 LEDs on a perfboard, the cathodes all connected by a continuous strip of non-isolated wire (I think I used paper clips for that), and the anodes all individually connected to the shift register output pins via flexible wires. It took me several weeks to finish this with a cheap 10 EUR soldering iron from my local hardware store, and it did not look nice from the back.

It worked very reliable, however, and I used it to display the time, the date and some small animations for some years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_register

I have one of these [0]; it's fun and a good topic of conversation when we have visitors over.

[0] https://www.tindie.com/products/obso/pdp-11-replica-kit-the-...

My first thought went to Project Blinkenlights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blinkenlights

Reminded me of this scene from IT Crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12LLJFSBnS4

In this context Project Blinkenlights in Germany should be mentioned. They are using big buildings and illuminate the windows to create some kind of public pixelart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blinkenlights

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from "The IT Crowd"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12LLJFSBnS4

I wonder how much money was made from blinkenlights. In the late 90s world of TV production we had fun things such as racks of SGI hardware and telecine colourist desks, typically in rooms with controlled lighting. Clients were always impressed by these obelisks of power and they knew they were getting something for their money.

Nowadays entire rooms full of kit could be ported to a Raspberry PI, no blinkenlights needed, but how do you charge a client big ticket money for that?

Easy. Just have some linux screens with lots of terminal windows running things like nmap, htop and the like.

We went from blinkenlights to The Matrix via Jurassic Park to get to this, and, nowadays, a room full of servers projects as much power as a cabinet full of HVAC equipment. Nobody is impressed.

Sometimes less was more. There were very accurate timekeeping clocks that cost tens of thousands but didn't even tell the time. The 1U unit would just have a power light, no clock. If you wanted to know the time then you would need a specialist clock that worked with the time signal that came out the back, or you would have to solder your own special MODEM lead and plug it into a laptop and TELNET in. This was not convenient if you just wanted to check if it was going home time yet.

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 23

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG

Computers had such style then. It’s easy to see why we thought they would make the future so bright.

“My own adventure turned out to be quite different. I'm not like you, Bilbo."

modprobe usbcore blinkenlights=1

> KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.

That must be in Southern German, ya?