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It was wonderful, I miss being able to hear my hard drive doing stuff, it was a really handy audible indicator.
I can definitely hear my hard drive when I access it. Every folder I go deeper, I can hear it working. It’s quite fun.
Dot matrix printer was straight outta jabba’s droid torture chamber
You guys are too young. Back in the early 80s computer didn’t make any noise. A C64 was quiet as a mouse, so was an Amiga 500. The only noise it made was the ticking of the disk drive. (Usually no HDD in those and no fans)
I have both at home right now, and I am always wishing my gaming rig next to them would be that quiet, and not sound like a hoover going into overdrive.
Ah, nostalgia. Now, where are my rose tinted glasses?
p.s. Oh yeah I forgot about the monitor whine, but hey that’s because I have a permanent tinnitus that sounds exactly the same and usually tune it out… wonder where I got it from?
Those c64 1541 drives could make an unholy racket sometimes, I recall some sneakernet software cloning tools making it sound like a jackhammer
I love a good Womp! from pressing the monitor degaussing button.
The what
The degauss sound on a CRT display. The ‘womp’ is the best onomatopoeia to represent it.
Thanks!
See, I remember that from friends (our first was a little later, a 286 IBM that was pretty loud).
BUT, my nostalgia comes from the sound of a server room. I ran a BBS as a teen, and later randomly visited all the startup ISPs in the area before one brought me on as employee #3. We started with shelves of external modems before moving to one rack, but when we were bought and those few times I went to real server rooms (and times since) were great. The organization, level sound, raised floors, love it.
Surprisingly I still prefer quiet for my homelab, though.
The internet used to warn us of the horrors we were about to see when we tried connecting.
The screeching cry of a long dead apex predator followed by “Welcome! You’ve got mail!”
“What if you could make music with these computer noises?”
My personal favorite is still this one: https://youtu.be/RLXQpJgZklk?is=HGUWnYQasi0IM1wZ I honestly think it sounds cooler than the original.
Why did computers make the computer thinking noise anyway?
They imagine pegging and get excited.
Depends on what it was thinking about really. The really rapid clicking noise was generally the mechanical hard drive heads seeking and moving quickly. You could tell if it had been thinking too hard for too long when the mechanical drive sounded like it had sneezed quietly (I’m not joking), that’s when you started to back stuff up rather quickly.
The more single-tone longer-note experience was generally reserved for the floppy disks.
The quiet mechanical spin-up noise was often an optical drive spinning the media - usually a CD - up to it’s normal reading speed, and you quickly forgot about it.
If it sounded like it was thinking like a early morning bird with a hangover, they were reminiscent of the early 90min tape drives. More industrial drives didn’t make that noise thankfully.
The aircraft engine type noise was generally one or more of the case fans giving it some VTEC love to cool a component that was running hot, or if someone smashed the Turbo button.
i have an old hdd that has been doing the click of death for at least 15 years now and still works as good as new.
And hopefully automatic backups every few minutes?
it’s literally one of my backup hdds.
“You have become what you swore to destroy”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Analogue progress bars
Fake nostalgia detected, computers were not that loud.
The post is clearly hyperbole (I shouldn’t have to explain this but apparently some people around here aren’t aware of figures of speech), but computers used to be much louder than they are, floppy disks were very “talkative”, you could hear the HDD heads move and disks spinning under heavy load, and fans were much louder on average than they are today. On top of that, the motherboard speaker was used very liberally by everything.
Oh, and everyone had mechanical keyboards, but people of culture still do.
floppy disks were very “talkative”
It was pretty loud
Bet you didn’t hear the whine of CRT coils either.
Are you saying that because you had the computer next to the dot matrix printer? Because I could see that driving a person to think computers weren’t that loud.
You’re right. Just the fans and drives.
