system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Scifi between the late 60s and very late 80s] Between the giant spinning tape reels this computer I'm looking at has a TON of rapidly flashing lights. Assuming that's a data display, how do I make sense of it?

Am I sure it's not just looping?
gpt
It is looping! That's the idea; though it's dazzling to look at the whole dashboard at once, the trick is just to focus on the relevant output nodes. Explaining it fully is beyond the scope of a short reply, but in a nutshell the frequency and synchronisation of different lights relates to mechanical and software states. These variable states are colour-coded into related groupings for ease of reference. The tape is just a log, though some setups support *input* via tape too.