Now it is miles of cabling, the blinking of lights on servers, and a trader's bright-blue jacket hanging in a glass case in a data centre in Essex.
Because we were struck by an outage at the same time here, I can attest that there was no warning, no blinking of lights.
She looked like a statuette: blond pixie cut, floor-length gold sequinned gown, her small figure catching every blink of light in Roy Thomson Hall.
His 1966 film "The Flicker" consisted only of rapidly, randomly blinking patterns of light.
Then it streaks across the middle distance in a small part of a second, really just a blink of lights, and whines away.
They invoke the anxious thrills of an adolescent in a darkened room, illuminated with the blinking of multicolored lights, each machine the center of a group's attention, each group focusing on the fate of a gleaming ball going almost too fast to track, as it teases and taunts or promptly sweeps downward to its death, daring you to try again with another coin.
The blinking of the lights was like a heartbeat with which you moved in tandem.
My week has never been thrown into chaos by the sudden blinking of a warning light on the dashboard, followed by the apologetic cough of a failing starter motor.
According to Sony, some of the problems associated with the blinking of the blue light could include no audio or video output to the TV and the console powering off.
A combination of rumour and false information fed their hope that he was still alive, lost in the gulag, even until the revolution of 2011, when the gates of Abu Salim were broken open and dozens of men stumbled, blinking, into the light of freedom.
