You must log in or # to comment.
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!”
Did a bot/AI write this? No drive sounded like that. Something wrong with the drive if it screamed at you. That‘s the modem. A floppy sounded like a robo-chicken. BROOoonnk -buk-buk-buk BRooonnk BrROooonk-buk-buk….
CDs used to scream. You needed to double the audio volume to hide the read cycles on tomb raider.
Dot matrix printer was straight outta jabba’s droid torture chamber
On the other hand, actual line printers worked exactly like they look in movies.
But yeah those 9 pin dot matrix printers…24 pin was better, but still pretty loud. I remember visiting a college library during a field trip, and they had an inkjet (I think it was actually a Bubblejet) and it was like, “WOW LOOK HOW QUIET THAT IS!”
Good thing I never needed to print anything in privacy back then. Those were loud screeching buzzing machines and we just accepted it as normal.
Ours shook the table but was on so badly that the legs came unbolted over the years.
Then we got a StyleWriter and it was magic even 1/2 page per minute in color!
This post reminds me of the savage joy I felt the first time I fired up a 1u server. Those screaming fans were just chef’s kiss
Anakin Skywalker ITS WORKING! meme
Why did computers make the computer thinking noise anyway?
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)_/¯
But what about the pterodactyl noise?
Your computer is possessed and needs McAffee VirusScan totes immediates
Analogue progress bars
They imagine pegging and get excited.
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?
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!
My high school had a room full of Apples, mostly IIe’s but a few GSs floating around, too. I could hear when someone left one of those monitors on the moment I entered the room…
Those c64 1541 drives could make an unholy racket sometimes, I recall some sneakernet software cloning tools making it sound like a jackhammer
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.
I remember it sounding a lot cooler than that.
It was wonderful, I miss being able to hear my hard drive doing stuff, it was a really handy audible indicator.
You may be interested in getting a multi drive NAS then. Mine is full with 8 drives and i can hear them from the next room. It’s nice to hear, but sometimes it can be a bit much.
I can still hear the harddrives spin up when someone starts watching something on my homelab. I do miss the clickies, I wonder if you could hook up the disk activity led to a speaker to create fake clicks.
Here’s an HDD synth project for that very thing I saw the other day! Though probably won’t work for your use case, admittedly. It’s intended for retro systems and goes in an ISA slot, and isn’t available for sale yet anyway.
YouTube video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sASOfpzPjxg
Project page: https://www.strifestreams.com/hddsynth
“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.
Glad those days are gone. These days, a bit of coil whine can get annoying, though luckily my current GPU doesn’t suffer from it.
I spent extra on getting quiet fans and haven’t had an HDD for almost a decade now.
Those Be Quiet! fans are pretty good btw. Difference between the two that look the same but have different names is one is optimized for air movement while the other is optimized to generate static pressure. Run your fans such that there’s a slightly positive pressure and you’ll drastically reduce dust buildup… But you don’t need the pressure optimized fans to do that, just more intake than exhaust will do so (assuming they are all set to the same speed and are the same size).
This is reminding me of the sounds of loading DOS on our IBM PCjr.
Yeah, I’m old. Get off my Chiclet keyboard. (Actually we had the replacement keyboard, but later we did acquire a Chiclet version somehow.)
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.
Fake nostalgia detected, computers were not that loud.
It was pretty 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”
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.
Bet you didn’t hear the whine of CRT coils either.
You’re right. Just the fans and drives.
