I really miss being able to hear computers think. not like the fans kicking into high gear. it was like the hard drive or something, idk. they used to creak. it was awesome
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A PhD student in Physics back around 1975 liked to set a radio on the CPU cabinet of the PDP-10, as he could identify which section of his large Fortran program was executing by the frequencies of the Do-loops.
There were actually a lot of things you could deduce based on hearing the harddrive. For example, when playing a game like #DAOC you could predict enemies being near based on your harddrive activity… the machine had to load the models etc. Fun times..
Back in '93, I had a full size tower with 2 full-size Seagate ST-4096 drives in it. Oooh yeah, 192 megabytes of storage! If both disks were accessed, the thing would shake visibly.
Yup... I was an IBM 4331 mainframe operator in the early 80's. I was in the fishbowl room with the elevated floor, tape drives, huge printer, and keypunch machines, using 8" floppies...
My modern gaming PC is so quiet that I can actually hear my overflow storage HDD kick on and start spinning whenever I accidentally click on it in File Explorer instead of the SSD right above it.
HDDs had two sounds that I enjoy. The soft warm spin up sounds, and the little clicky tapping sound while the disk is being accessed that always reminded me of a coffee percolator. They have a devices that can reintroduce the tapping sound. https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker
The lack of vibration dampening, the metal on metal chassis and older IDE drivers. Today, I have a SATA drive somewhere in my machine that I know does stuff, but I can't hear it.
You could literally place your hand on them and feel what was right or wrong with them back then. Friends used to joke saying I was a tech priest being able to "lay hands on" to fix issues.
Yeah, the heads on the hard drives clicking. I miss that. When I boot up my (rapidly ageing and unreliable) OG Xbox and hear that clicking it brings me back... Such an endearing sound 🎮
Which is what my poor old man is during currently. I either get the red ring of death, error 07 (IIRC) or it takes 10 minutes to boot. Looked into modding it to save it, didn't have the time (or tools) to figure it out unfortunately 😓 still an option though for when I find the time
You could diagnose a lot of issue by ear back then. I kind of miss it. Won’t have to worry that software settings get messed up by the latest update, etc.
Being retired I miss the solitude of the computer floor. The cool air of the chillers, the white noise of hundreds of fans, and the sounds of hard disks and tape silos doing their jobs.
Occasionally I've looked up YouTube videos of dial up sounds, floppy risk reads and HDD seek noises. It's come up in conversation with my older acquaintances.
Nice when video games have those sounds in if they're based in that era.
one of my hard drives still clicks sometimes, intermittently in the truest sense of the word. I don't know which one, and I don't care because the data isn't important. It makes me want to chuck my PC out the window
Lots of software had specific HDD songs they would repeat. I can still hear the exact sound that Myst made while it was loading up: "Chunk.....chuckAAAAA....chunk chunk"
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https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker
https://youtu.be/U8GAnJgx08I
It felt like I was doing something.
Nice when video games have those sounds in if they're based in that era.
And there are the fans noisy all the time, even more if I render on Blender or watch YouTube at 1080p TwT