thumb|Lights on the front panel of a DEC PDP-8 (1965) thumb|The Harwell Dekatron Computer does arithmetic at approximately human speed. Watching the lights allows one to follow the instructions and the changing data as it runs the Squares program displayed on the panels In computer jargon, blinkenlights are diagnostic lights on front panels of old mainframe computers. More recently the term applies to status lights of modern network hardware (modems, network hubs, etc.). Blinkenlights disappeared from more recent computers for a number of reasons, the most important being the fact that with fa
thumb|Lights on the front panel of a DEC PDP-8 (1965) thumb|The Harwell Dekatron Computer does arithmetic at approximately human speed. Watching the lights allows one to follow the instructions and the changing data as it runs the Squares program displayed on the panels In computer jargon, blinkenlights are diagnostic lights on front panels of old mainframe computers. More recently the term applies to status lights of modern network hardware (modems, network hubs, etc.). Blinkenlights disappeared from more recent computers for a number of reasons, the most important being the fact that with faster CPUs a human can no longer interpret the processes in the computer on the fly.
== Origins == The term has its origins in hacker humor and is taken from a famous (often blackletter-Gothic) mock warning sign written in a mangled form of German. Variants of the sign were relatively common in computer rooms in English-speaking countries from the early 1960s. One version read:
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).