You used to get used to the seeking sounds of your personal computer booting and loading programs and could tell when something was wrong by the sound being wrong somehow
During the pandemic, my iPod classic died, which is when I found some random dude in the midwest who was refurbishing iPods and installing SSDs in them and brother(sister, whatever) I have a 4 year old iPod classic that fucking screams
I keep Task Manager open and can refer to it when my computer is being derpy, and typically it shows 100% disk activity from some thing. (And if that thing is "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry", it gets yeeted.) So, sorta a modern version of that.
I have a 15yo iPod classic that I can only load things onto from a previous laptop running an ancient version of iTunes, and every part of the process feels fragile and tangible and personal every time.
I remember a program, in MS-DOS days, someone had written which deliberately spun things to make it sound like water was draining from the PC. Good times.
I knew someone that worked at Apple once. They had an early iPod engineering prototype made out of breadboards and regular size disk drives on some shelf in the back of the lab. I always wished I could have seen it.
The other day the Blu-ray drive in my PS5 couldn’t read a disc and it made so many wonderful noises sliding the laser head around. These things need to make little screeches again
I have one still from like 2008? It was my uncle's and he gave it to me not too long ago. It's factory, not even too scratched cus it was a car thing mostly. I love it and I bring it with me EVERYWHERE
p.s. I was trying to add alt text when I fat fingered and posted somehow, also hence the typo ☹️ it’s a 160GB, one of the last (if not the last) models with a hard drive. I’m afraid to take off the case to look, shocked it still works
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https://eoe.works/
People thought it was straight up magic but I was just listening to it work.