21–30 of 43 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss all the old PC sounds except the fans.
I do not miss the high pitched whine of 90's harddrives.
It provided some hope that an unresponsive computer was in the middle of a monumental task. Any flicker of light or change on cadence was reassurance that progress was being made and would complete should you wait just a little bit longer.
I miss the sound of popping a floppy disk in the drive.
I have a thing for dialup modem handshake sounds.
When I was on call, however, pager storms resulted in the phone being muted quickly. Nothing helps the stress of triaging production issues like the high pitched scream of suppressors and cancellers being disabled.
I miss the sound of popping a floppy disk in the drive.
It's silly at this point in time but windows 3.11 (the first version of windows I used) also feel decidedly "modern" where as DOS is "old" (even though less than 10 years separated my first experiences with them, and both were way longer than 10 years ago).
Article has inaccuracies. The HD floppy is to formatted 1.44MB, not 1.2MB, and unformatted capacity was 2.0MB. People did not program word processors themselves as they didn't exist, typewriters did. Later, pre disk, magazines type-ins and software on (magnetic) tapes were common means of software distribution. How to tell me your under 30 without telling me you're under 30 :D
[1] 2 sides / disk * 18 tracks / side * 80 sectors / track * 512 bytes / sector = 1,474,560 bytes = 1440 * 1024 bytes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss all the old PC sounds except the fans.
This has me thinking but I don't like to assume. I recall most of my first computers really not having any dedicated fans until around 1999 - they mostly used the power supply to pull an airflow through cases. I do miss some of the sounds that let you know machines were doing something - but we also had indication lights, too - mostly gone now, for disk drives. Heck my first laptop had a second LCD to show battery le…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has me thinking but I don't like to assume. I recall most of my first computers really not having any dedicated fans until around 1999 - they mostly used the power supply to pull an airflow through cases. I do miss some of the sounds that let you know machines were doing something - but we also had indication lights, too - mostly gone now, for disk drives. Heck my first laptop had a second LCD to show battery le…
I'm pretty sure the original Pentium ('93) was when CPU fans became mandatory.
Some large OEMs with the resources to do the design effort could use a large passive heatsink on even surprisingly late processor (i. e. Pentium 4) because they could make a holistic design with shrouds and baffles and know you were getting just enough airflow from a case fan elsewhere to keep the CPU within spec.
Early ATX designs, in fact, were often based on "the PSU has its fan placed so that it will draw air over the CPU heatsink and out the back"
Enthusiasts, obviously, went for brute force designs.