3 ms·

Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing this afternoon. The absence of physical switches for wifi/microphone/camera is probably due to a mix of lowering ma

by model-m 12y ago

Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing this afternoon. The absence of physical switches for wifi/microphone/camera is probably due to a mix of lowering manufacturing cost and cutting on "my computer no work" maintenance calls, but I really would feel somewhat safer if I had them. Fun fact: when I bought a hard drive for my computer (one of those old MFM 20 MB drives, it was the late eighties), I found it very noisy. The hard drive was internal, so I engineered a physical on-off switch by routing its power input through the otherwise unused turbo switch (remember those?) that was on my computer case. When I wanted to write in peace, I would turn the drive off, before turning the computer on, and boot from a floppy disk. I just had to be careful not to turn the drive off when it was already spinning, and I never did.

pogue 12y ago
The Turbo switch! I had forgotten all about those. Did those actually ever have any function?
- moepstar 12y ago
  Absolutely, it did change the clock speed of the processor (back then measured lower double-digit MHz/Megahertz).
  - kubiiii 12y ago
    Pretty useful to play games designed for the 8086 on a 286 or 386. Alley cat with the turbo was more like alley cat on meth.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  Yes! Years ago, processor speeds evolved slowly enough that it was practical for game developers to write all animation delays in their games something like this: for (i=0; i<400; i++) ; They would test their delay value and then increase their loop count as necessary. This was a lot easier than doing clock-based delays. I'm not sure how it was on Windows/DOS at the time, but around the same era on MacOS, you couldn't even get millisecond accuracy without a lot of effort. The standard time unit on a Mac then was the tick, or 1/60th of a second, and some things didn't look too nice at tick granularity. So this kind of time delay in games and other software was common practice. When processors did start getting significantly faster, some games became unplayable or bugged out altogether. Along came the turbo button: it didn't actually make your computer faster, it made it slower. Because of the confusing name, the turbo button was usually rigged so that you would leave it on by default -- using your processor's manufactured clock speed -- but if you wanted to play an older game that relied on processor speed for delay timing, you would deactivate the turbo, slowing your system clock speed down to something that matched older hardware.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    I suspect an example of these is the old xlander game. That's where you simulate landing a spacecraft on the moon using keyboard controls for thrusters. Back in the 1990s I could run that on my Pentium 180 Mhz system. Trying again ~10 years later I found that lunar gravity had increased markedly since ;-)

by model-m 12y ago

pogue 12y ago

The Turbo switch! I had forgotten all about those. Did those actually ever have any function?

moepstar 12y ago
Absolutely, it did change the clock speed of the processor (back then measured lower double-digit MHz/Megahertz).
- kubiiii 12y ago
  Pretty useful to play games designed for the 8086 on a 286 or 386. Alley cat with the turbo was more like alley cat on meth.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
Yes! Years ago, processor speeds evolved slowly enough that it was practical for game developers to write all animation delays in their games something like this: for (i=0; i<400; i++) ; They would test their delay value and then increase their loop count as necessary. This was a lot easier than doing clock-based delays. I'm not sure how it was on Windows/DOS at the time, but around the same era on MacOS, you couldn't even get millisecond accuracy without a lot of effort. The standard time unit on a Mac then was the tick, or 1/60th of a second, and some things didn't look too nice at tick granularity. So this kind of time delay in games and other software was common practice. When processors did start getting significantly faster, some games became unplayable or bugged out altogether. Along came the turbo button: it didn't actually make your computer faster, it made it slower. Because of the confusing name, the turbo button was usually rigged so that you would leave it on by default -- using your processor's manufactured clock speed -- but if you wanted to play an older game that relied on processor speed for delay timing, you would deactivate the turbo, slowing your system clock speed down to something that matched older hardware.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  I suspect an example of these is the old xlander game. That's where you simulate landing a spacecraft on the moon using keyboard controls for thrusters. Back in the 1990s I could run that on my Pentium 180 Mhz system. Trying again ~10 years later I found that lunar gravity had increased markedly since ;-)