During this era, everybody in programming was obsessed with what was was called "readability".
It was all the rage in the industry at the time.
Some platforms had buttons/switches on the front panel and you entered the program manually one bit/one instruction at a time. When you hit run the thing would light up like a christmas tree.
Every computer on TV and Movies always has blinking lights. Makes me laugh. The old computers had blinking lights on the front panel displaying each instruction it was running in binary in real time. The only reason those blinking lights were there was so the programmers would know the computer was still running and had not crashed.
But to see blinking lights on mainframes in the 60s and 70s such as Star Trek and other Sci Fi shows, was ridiculous television theatrics. By then the blinking "I'm still working" lights, while fun to look at, were mostly gone.
P.S. I should note the only reason I know these things is from military training. In the 80s, the military was decades behind in technology. But it was a Great experience in 1950s technology. I wasn't even born when Star Trek came out. Did not want to give the wrong impression.
