Our crowdsourcing experiment worked and people from all over came together to discover the garbled text was actually an image. Thanks to Squid808 for posting it to the forum and thanks to the group who started transcribing the text by hand to figure it out.

This is great work and we appreciate the help, but these people did extra work while we were dealing with our own schedules. Bertram has now created a way for all who have offered to help to interact directly with the cube.

This should ensure our day jobs don’t interfere with communication or productivity elsewhere. Bertram added a page to the site and posted the following to the forum.

I’ve been working all night to make this happen. We now have what I call the “Cube Console” on the EI2 website. The technical magic which makes this possible is the cobbled together serial/USB cable connected to a modern computer (one with a real network interface on it), and some custom software of my creation.

You should be able to experience what Cray and I do when sitting in front of the Mac Classic. I hope it holds up – it isn’t exactly a piece of software engineering artwork

Again, we appreciate all of the help and hope this direct interaction will be of use. Thanks to everyone on the forum for coming together to help discover what was on the cube.