The TURBO button is back!

[Lorne]

At the system assembly business I worked at we use to just jumper the MB turbo , Set the display clock to some rediculous number sometimes.
When we were doing a huge business net system we would set the turbo display to show what unit # it was, It was funny how some of them would migrate around the building, Also the complaint because there machine was broken because it was only running at 1-10mhz, Told them that was only a unit #display not speed.


I hate those clicky keyboards, the latency of the click to when I actually hit the key messes with my head.

 

[jaqie]

Originally posted by: Lorne
I hate those clicky keyboards, the latency of the click to when I actually hit the key messes with my head.

If you mean the time between the click sound and when the key is sent to the PC, that is in the nanosecond range, I don't know how you could tell a difference there with that tiny time differential. Also, not all "click sound" keyboards are buckling spring, that may explain your situation as well.

As for the LED speed display, I concur. I remember setting a triple digit one to 666 (it was a celeron 667Mhz {which is actually 666.66_Mhz} so it was correct) Boy, they didn't like that. From then on I set them to say HI and LO.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: jaqie
From then on I set them to say HI and LO.

"No wonder Windows crashed. The PC was hi."

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Aflac
I remember having a turbo button on my Pentium I. I had (and still don't) have any idea what it did, but I thought it made the computer go faster, so I kept it on.

For those who are curious, the "Turbo" button was an on/off button on the front of old PCs that underclocked the CPU on demand. For marketing reasons, this was usually advertised as a "speedup" button rather than a "slowdown" button, and labelled "TURBO". Sometimes there was also an LED display included that showed the current clockspeed of the CPU.

The reason you would want to do this is that some old programs (mostly very early PC games) were written so that they calculated internal timers or delays based on explicitly counting CPU clock cycles. This isn't as idiotic as it sounds if you are writing programs in assembler, as doing it the right way can be complicated (and at the time, almost every PC ran at the same clockspeed, or at one of a handful of known speeds.) Such programs would run way too fast if executed on a faster CPU than the programmer anticipated; by underclocking the CPU you could usually get it to run at the right speed.

Eventually games and other programs stopped being written like that, and then it didn't matter if you ran your program on a faster CPU anymore.

 

[Roguestar]

Console games are still mostly written like that, too.