Many related relevant thoughts: • This sounds very similar to what Calm Technology¹ is trying to achieve. Their first example was a freely dangling string tie

Many related relevant thoughts: • This sounds very similar to what Calm Technology¹ is trying to achieve. Their first example was a freely dangling string tied to a motor, directly connected to the Ethernet. The string then spun soothingly in a corner with some auditory and visual indication of network activity. • I seem to recall that the developers of the new computer in The Birth of a New Machine connected (old, analogue) oscilloscopes to the CPU pins for register content, directly driving the X and Y coordinates of the oscilloscope beam, and thereby got a visual image of how the execution usually looked in different situations, and when they looked “wrong”, it was time to slow down and analyze step-by-step. • Many older machines were not very well shielded against RF interference, so in olden times hackers used to turn on a radio to the most interfered channels to listen to the CPU executing their program, which helped with debugging. (Later, many home computers were similarly not very good at compositing a TV signal, so the computer’s activities would partly bleed into the sound and/or video output. This also similarly aided debugging.) I was somewhat disappointed that the artificial sounds in the video were actually old game machine sound effects tied to events, not the actual sounds of the high-frequency events turned into audio. 1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Calm_technology&oldid=1237704042 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Calm_technology&o...>