The "blinkenlights" reminds me of the first time I saw a PDP-11 in the flesh, in a DEC computer room in 1981. I was astonished to see a blinking led pattern, which I was told was produced by the O/S's "null" process. I believe it was RSX-11 or 11M-plus (everything had to be -plus at DEC). Some years earlier I'd seen the same pattern coming from a cabinet behind Keith Emerson at an ELP concert and there was a general rumour that Emerson used computers in his elaborate keyboard setup. At the time I dismissed it as teenage nonsense...
As for trips down memory lane, my advice is don't. In the run-up to my retirement, now failed, I looked into getting VAX/VMS (the pinnacle of CISC) running under SIMH and doing a bit of assembly programming. A little bit of research convinced me that this was a pointless exercise in nostalgia and things had moved on so much you could probably get the O/S to boot up in emulation on a smartphone faster than the original hardware. Better to go where computing's gone - beyond the hardware, beyond the software, and to big data and probability maths. I might look into that when I actually retire; but no looking back.
