{"id":5363,"date":"2025-07-19T16:35:06","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T16:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/?p=5363"},"modified":"2025-07-19T16:36:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T16:36:26","slug":"the-blinking-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/the-blinking-light\/","title":{"rendered":"from the archives: The Blinking Light"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Blinking Light<\/strong><\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Robert W. Lucky<\/p>\n\n\n\n

November 2008<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflections<\/strong><\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n

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I was considering buying a new desktop computer, and I thought I had found the ideal model. That is, until I noticed that one little thing was missing\u2014the activity light for the hard drive. The manufacturer probably saved a few cents by leaving it out, but that little light was of some psychological importance to me. How could I possibly buy a computer that was just going to sit there and not give me any indication that it was working?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A very long time ago, not long after the dinosaurs went extinct, I was \u00adworking on modem design. At the Bell System, we had designed modems the way they were supposed to be\u2014big, heavy clunkers with a telephone handset and an embedded rotary dial. They were just what the users needed to connect to their time-shared mainframes. But one day, a competitor came out with a small modem that had an array of LED lamps on the front panel, indicating control signals like clear-to-send as well as data activity. \u201cWhat user could possibly care about such things?\u201d we joked among ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, it seemed that people did care about such things. That little company sold a lot of modems, and pretty soon we had indicator lights on our modems too. As a consequence, I learned a key principle of design: people want blinking lights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too many electronic gadgets are inert steel boxes with stickers on the \u00adbottom that say something like \u201cno user-serviceable parts inside.\u201d Often, you have no idea whether or not the gadget is working. When it doesn\u2019t do something you expect it to do, you stare helplessly at the box. \u201cAre you alive in there?\u201d you ask plaintively. But such entreaties are a waste of breath. You\u2019d think that the box could at least hum or vibrate to communicate life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A blinking light makes all the difference\u2014even though you have no idea why it\u2019s blinking the way it is. Over the millennia, humans have evolved a subconscious ability to recognize and categorize moving visual \u00adpatterns, like the flash of tiger fur seen through dense foliage. So it is with the activity light. I\u2019ve had several cable modems go bad, as well as several routers, and in every case I\u2019ve recognized the problem by the \u00adunfamiliar blinking patterns of the activity lights. \u201cAha,\u201d I say to myself. \u201cThat box is sick.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite often there is no visible activity on my computer screen, but I see the hard-drive light blinking furiously. What is it doing? I wonder. At least the little light tells me that it is alive, though I worry about why it is so busy. At such times I often wish that there were a special key labeled \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d I\u2019ve always found the task manager rather useless for this purpose, and no human being could possibly interpret the gibberish that fills your screen following the dreaded \u201cblue screen of death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of an unintelligible binary dump, my imagined key would give a simple English explanation: \u201cI\u2019m busy at the moment reformatting your hard drive,\u201d it might say, \u201cbut I\u2019ll be through in a jiffy.\u201d Or perhaps, \u201cI\u2019m just finishing the installation of a new virus.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back when dinosaurs ruled the planet, computers had lots of indicator lights, showing the activity on many of the backplane signals. When you walked past a computer center, a dynamic light show was taking place inside. Tapes spun and everything hummed. \u201cWow, look at those things think!\u201d you said to yourself. But now it seems that the only \u00adindication of life is the roar of air-conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the computer I picked out had joined the growing legion of gray boxes devoid of charisma, its only outward manifestation of personality having been sacrificed for a few cents. Maybe I\u2019m the only one who cares about that light now, but I\u2019m not buying that computer. Its designers are probably joking among themselves, \u201cWhat user could possibly care about such things?\u201d Well, I\u2019m one who does. For want of a cheap little light, they lost a customer. Hopefully, they\u2019ll put it back in their next model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

all copyrights and trademarks remain the property of respective owners<\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Blinking Light By Robert W. Lucky November 2008 Reflections I was considering buying a new desktop computer, and I thought I had found the ideal model. That is, until I noticed that one little thing was missing\u2014the activity light for the hard drive. The manufacturer probably saved a few cents by leaving it out, … Continue reading from the archives: The Blinking Light<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oUw6-1ov","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5363"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5368,"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5363\/revisions\/5368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwilliamcupp.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}