computoman

Blinking lights have been used on computers for years. What they mean varies from system to system.Manuals for the systems will hae documention on what all the variations mean.  Even on the home computer they most all have an led that signifies whether the power is turned on to the machine Maybe we could attach led to a local computer and then they are lit could mean one of ervera things depending on how ht e system is programmed.. You could start off with just two leds that you give you four possibilities.  Back then there were no computer screens to get information.  You could even add even more light for more possibilities.The traditional way was to add led]s to the parallel port. Eight leds would give you 2^8 or 256 possibilities. Possibly more than you would ever need. First setup we did like this was for the Atari ST computer. The picture is using a 32 bit computer. One could go a step further and instead of lights being on or off, a message could be s...

One of the first uses of computers was to encode messages such as with the enigma. Also used was the Navajo indian codetalkers to naturally send and receive messages so that the enemy could not decipher them. Even kids have used pig-latin to send secret messages. You do not have to get that compilcated though. Do not know morse code, then let the computer do the translation for you. You could use a program like codeit. and then go to the morse code option: If you have source file named test with: This is a test. Then the conversion to test.out might be:  -  ....  ..  ...   ..  ...   .-   -  .  ...  -  .-.-.- One thing to notice is that there is not differentiation between upper and lower case letters.  To do a program like this, you will want to set up a translation table. In fact, you could use any set of characters for your own secret code.     SELECT CASE UCASE$...