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Narrative
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Red Shoe: I can sense that this is different from Viewer Friendly Interface in an important way, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Can anyone else?
Ununnilium: Viewer Friendly Interface is more about making sure the audience can see what's going on. Extreme Graphical Representation doesn't actually have to show what's going on, only that something impressively is.
Ununnilium: Now, I added the The Oldest Ones In The Book ref. But I'm not sure where that version of the trope was first used. Anyone?
Licky Lindsay: I think manufacturers of computer hardware still use this trope as much as they did in UNIVAC days. The laptop I'm using right now has a row of L E D s below the screen, for stuff like Wi-Fi connectivity and battery status and several others that I don't even know what they do. There's one that blinks every time the hard drive is accessed, I think. This is as far as I can tell, all just blinkenlights so I know the computer is "alive".
Seven Seals: I'd say that's not an instance of this trope (or reality trying to mimick it). Most of the time you won't need those lights, but having a hardware indication of whether the harddisk is being accessed or what the battery status is can come in quite useful (since this information is not necessarily readily available in the OS), so it's not just lights for the heck of it. UNIVAC flashing lights as it does arithmetic is borderline — you could use those lights for status readout, but their primary function is obviously the wow factor. The displays used on television, on the other hand, rarely serve any purpose, obvious or otherwise (a few with vitals in the line of "battery status" could be expected, but having every screen flash with information is obviously overkill).
Morgan Wick: The hard drive light is very useful. Especially when it's impossible to tell if the computer is so busy with something it can't do anything else, or just locked up and in need of a reboot. Some of the lights are overkill though. Do I really need a light for wireless connectivity that basically just tells me if the wireless adapter is working when I can get a lot more information in the Windows systray?
Ununnilium: Edit: Never mind.
Gattsuru: Speaking as someone that does tech support, you may not need the wireless activity light, but most of my users do — far too many people call the tech line instead of remembering that they turned off their wireless while on a plane. Some devices (mostly mid-end Acers, although a few other companies are adding in) also blinkenlight the wireless network interface light, so it can also demonstrate some diagnostic information you may not get from the system tray. It's usually pointless, though. * Lock status is also useful, albeit increasingly less so as word processors add their own notification of it. You still see some that are a little ridiculous. I think the favorite I've encountered are the Google Gadgets/Windows Sidebar items that display CPU usage or fan speed : potentially useful, but mostly applied for the image value.
Kizor: I can see why it's done, but it's still ironic that visual media goes to such lengths to impress and/or intimidate computer Muggles. In my experience, they have been impressed and/or intimidated by: CMD CD C:\WINDOWS DIR |
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