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 colouri

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.