[friday99]

Not to burst your bubble, but that is just the vacuum can on the dilution refrigerator and is a standard piece of hardware you will see in many physics labs. There wasn't really any product design beyond slapping the IBM logo on there.

[lozaning]

Of course there was. Deciding what not to add is just as much of a design decision as what to add. I spend no time in physics labs, and like the parent i too find the aesthetic quite striking.

[reaperducer]

That's a lot of glass for the cleaning crew to wipe down each night. I wonder if it takes special training, or if someone just sticks a "Do not touch" Post-It note to the thing.

[mschaef]

Or "Do Not Erase!"

[Beltiras]

Or "Do not think about it. Tantamount to observation which will interfere with the calculations."

[rbanffy]

Now I imagined replacing the glass panes with transparent LCDs or LED displays that would give an idea of system status at a glance.

These machines are, like the supercomputers I mentioned, meant to be displayed as a status symbol.

[mschaef]

> replacing the glass panes with transparent LCDs or LED displays

I guess the CM-1/2/200 machines are the quintessential example of this. The Cray-2's cooling system isn't an active display, but it gets style points too (IMHO).

(But...I've worked in a few places that used glass windows (or other glass surfaces) as whiteboards... That's really what I was thinking of. :-) )

[rbanffy]

The Cray-2 had some indicator lights on the top of each lobe. I'm not sure how helpful they were to gain an understanding of what the computer was doing. I can't tell how much work my home cluster is doing by looking at the ethernet switch LEDs.

The LCD would nicely replicate the window-as-whiteboard experience though, at the sacrifice of some readability, because the object behind the glass is so interesting.