a campus of computing curiosities
blinkenlights.com — campus homepage & neutral ground
Welcome to the Weenie Museums, a small campus of loving parody museums devoted to computing culture. Three front doors, one shared gift shop, and — by charter — no official position on text editors.
This site, blinkenlights.com, is the campus homepage and the neutral ground between the Unix Wing and the Linux Wing. Think of it as Switzerland with more toggle switches. The hardware lives here, where nobody argues about kernels — only about which front panel blinked prettiest.
The hardware wing — this site.
Toggle switches, glowing panels, and machines older than the arguments about them. The feud-free zone.
→ Enter the Hall
The Unix Wing.
Fifty-plus years of “everything is a file”. Do one thing and do it well — this museum does three things, but who’s counting.
→ unixweenie.com
The Linux Wing.
The kernel that ate the world, one distribution at a time. The penguin approves of this museum.
→ linuxweenie.com
Before windows, before icons, before mice: a wall of toggle switches and glowing status lights. Programmers flipped switches to boot the machine — in octal, by hand, usually at 2 a.m. Come pay your respects to the original user interface.
Half a century of modal editing versus infinite extensibility, hosted here on neutral ground like a proper summit. Cast your vote, read a little history, and enjoy our strictly impartial roasts.
One merch shelf serving all three wings: Unix Weenie tees, Linux Weenie tees, :wq stickers, a Tux plush, and a poster honoring ed, the standard text editor. Print-on-demand launching soon — today it’s a concept shelf.
“Pop Quiz: What was the first personal computer? Be careful before you answer!” The original blinkenlights.com quiz — Kenbaks, Altos, Kitchen Computers and all — preserved with its 1990s dry wit intact.
From the 1950 Simon “mechanical brain” to a tic-tac-toe machine built from 10,000 Tinkertoys: the kits and toys that taught a generation to think in binary. GENIACs, Digi-Comps, the Minivac 601, and Hasbro’s gloriously oversold Think-a-Tron.