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YOU SHOULD KNOW RULE (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by [M] to c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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[–] 48 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Ah yes, and the turbo light. Offering the illusion of some vague notion of enhanced speed of some sort, somewhere inside box.

I had a pc with a 486mhz processor and and a cordless phone with a 900mhz processor. Both communicated via the same copper wires.

And don't forget Napster. What a time to be alive and chat in the Microsoft network chat rooms.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The cordless phone was a 900MHz radio, not processor.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    And it was a 80486 model CPU. Probably at 25MHz.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I have a 486 DX4 that runs at 100mhz. It was faster than the contemporary Pentium that ran at 80mhz. Though this was one of the last 486s and later Pentiums hit higher speeds.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    The Turbo button actually slowed down your processor for backwards compatibility reasons. Older software was expecting the CPU clock to be below a certain threshold, and would crash (or run way too fast) if the clock was too fast. Sort of like old games tying the physics to the framerate, then the physics gets all weird when the frame rate changes. The Turbo button was a way to boot old programs without needing to dig into your BIOS to downclock the CPU manually.

    Old games were especially bad about it. They’d rely on the CPU clock for in-game timing, so the game would basically run in super speed if the CPU clock was too fast. The Turbo button allowed you to slow the CPU down to make those games playable again.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Why in the hell did they call it "turbo" when it's literally the opposite

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Turbo was the default behavior. There was a toggle button that turned off the turbo light and slowed the machine down when needed for compatibility. Note: almost nobody needed this capability it sometimes they bumped the button and later wondered why the pc was slow.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago*

    The previous user isn't wrong per se, but just to clarify: if the indicator light is on, the "turbo" (default) mode is on and the device is running at full performance. Turbo off means it's downclocked.

    It's more a misnomer to call it turbo when in fact it's just the standard speed of the device, while the mode that is actually toggled using the turbo button is what causes it to run slower for compatibility reasons.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I never did AOL or MS chat. I was one of those Usenet and IRC degenerates. Oddly enough, it seems like the true sickos were in AOL/MSN all along.

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