I miss the days when PCs made sounds like these

[nickdalzell]

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but everytime I use a 'modern' PC or laptop the lack of sound is quite...unnerving. Here I am browsing AF with a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 that's a very nice laptop, but it has absolutely zero noise. no fans noise, and especially no disk noise. That one gets me the most. I really long to return to the stepper motor hard drive days, or find some hacker who made an SATA to MFM converter so my gaming rig could at least have some ST-225 goodness and be used to store documents or pictures. I like hearing the sound of work being done.

Unique IBM Hard Drive Operating Sounds - YouTube

 

[Dannydet]

You could always download those sounds and save them as mp3 files and play them on a loop as you work on your new pcs and laptops.

 

[nickdalzell]

Yeah but then they aren't making the sounds when they should. Like if I open Steam it won't suddenly clatter to life giving that confidence that something is actually happening given most machines today don't even had disk access LEDs anymore. Steam could be slow to load, and oftentimes it gets 'stuck' and not hearing a blasted thing doesn't help me decide what's happening until either it opens or does nothing leaving me scratching my head. Us older folk were used to at least having a blinking HDD LED to tell us something is happening or not.

It'd be neat though if an emulator existed that would make the relevant sounds as the disk is being accessed. Heck. I'd love to see that classic BIOS Memory count come back sound and all, along with LED front-panel speed readouts.

 

[jhtalisman]

Do you want AOL and Earthlink to make a comeback too?

 

[mikedt]

I maybe old fashioned, but I miss the...

?LOAD ERROR
READY

...and...

R Tape loading error, 0:1

...from the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum.

 

[Hadron]

I don't miss that stuff at all: the flip side of those noises was physically fragile, energy-inefficient drives, and I'm happy to consign them to the same oubliette as dial-up modems and 5 1/4" floppy disks.

 

[mikedt]

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but everytime I use a 'modern' PC or laptop the lack of sound is quite...unnerving. Here I am browsing AF with a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 that's a very nice laptop, but it has absolutely zero noise. no fans noise, and especially no disk noise. That one gets me the most. I really long to return to the stepper motor hard drive days, or find some hacker who made an SATA to MFM converter so my gaming rig could at least have some ST-225 goodness and be used to store documents or pictures. I like hearing the sound of work being done.

Unique IBM Hard Drive Operating Sounds - YouTube

I certainly don't miss unreliable HDDs, especially the click-of-death sounds or the squeal from a failed bearing.

Those Kalok Octagons were notoriously bad, along with IBM Deskstars(Deathstars) and Miniscribes. And something I found from my own experience in the early 90s, DO NOT operate a Samsung HDD in anything but the horizontal position.

 

[jhtalisman]

And something I found from my own experience in the early 90s, DO NOT operate a Samsung HDD in anything but the horizontal position.

Good thing my 2tb HDD's are Toshiba, I guess.

To the OP, wanna go back to when 100mb HDD's were considered excessive? I mean SSD's are much better for power consumption/battery life for laptops, space, etc. When building a PC I don't even factor in SSD's and NVME drives anymore when selecting a PSU.

 

[nickdalzell]

I just miss the sound. I don't miss dial-up internet or that crap. I just miss the sound of a PC working. It's also a great way to know if it's frozen or not (disk access LEDs also helped) instead of double-clicking an icon and praying that an app actually appears soon, and am often left wondering if I did double-click it correctly or if the PC failed to load since it's utterly quiet and even crash dialogs have become increasingly rare.

By this thread, I never intended to say I miss everything about 80s PCs. I just wish there were some method to at least use an old HDD in a modern system for small items like documents. It'd give me the sound back at least, which feels appropriate. I don't like PCs being unnervingly silent. It's just me, and again, I meant that I indeed miss the sound of the old hardware.

That Kalok drive in that video was still going more than 30 years later. Can you ever say that about a modern SSD in 30 years? You'd hit the write limit before 10 the way modern OSs index the damn things.

Another thing about older drives was that if you suddenly heard it clattering in the middle of the night for no apparant reason, you would be alerted to malware potentially early on. Today? Silence. No way to know if the PC is doing anything or not.

 

[nickdalzell]

I maybe old fashioned, but I miss the...

?LOAD ERROR
READY

...and...

R Tape loading error, 0:1

...from the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum.

I miss the handwritten errors that many sysadmins did back in the UNIVAC and Fortan days.

>man fish
don't say fish bishop

>man overboard
Bugs: no life raft

>you can tuna file system, but you can't tuna fish

>You can't do that in horizontal mode

>tsk tsk
tsk, tsk? Have I been a bad computer?

>something's rotten in Denmark, Interrrrpt stack misaligned

>INIT fail: not enough data (% bytes) with which to do jack, ignored

Or the old Tandy Star Trek messages from the TRS-80 era:

"Shut 'er down Scotty, she's suckin' mud again!"

"Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life here"

 

[mikedt]

That Kalok drive in that video was still going more than 30 years later. Can you ever say that about a modern SSD in 30 years? You'd hit the write limit before 10 the way modern OSs index the damn things.

I'm quite sure that working Kalok is a rather rare item. Because back in the day those things did have a very high failure rate, along with the IBM Deathstar drives. There was also early Connor 8-bit IDE drives, where the sealing gaskets decompose into sticky liquid goo, so probably no working examples of them now. And Miniscribe was a story of house bricks, fraud, failure, and lawsuits.

Another thing about older drives was that if you suddenly heard it clattering in the middle of the night for no apparant reason, you would be alerted to malware potentially early on. Today? Silence. No way to know if the PC is doing anything or not.

I've had 15 years of using MacBook laptops, and only failures I've experienced there, was a duff CD/DVD, that was replaced under warranty, and a 6 year old battery that bulged.

BTW I still have a 15 year old iPod video, and the 60GB Toshiba 1.8in HDD still works in that, although the battery has lost most of its capacity now.

 

[mikedt]

Good thing my 2tb HDD's are Toshiba, I guess.

From experience the Toshiba USB ones seem to be reliable, same with the Seagate Passport USB HDDs, and they certainly seem to be student proof from what I've seen at the school.

 

[Milo Williamson]

I really do not mind about the sounds though, but the last soundtrack that I did blast on my p.c. ages ago was the Quake album.
Got me into Nine Inch Nails when I was really young, and can hum "Something I could never have"

 

[nickdalzell]

The only Miniscribe I had experience with was the one in my old Vendex HeadStart Plus XT clone. It never failed, but I do miss that startup sound it made, whirrr whirrrr BEEP!

It also made satisfying sounds when busy. I had that PC from 1988 to about 2001 and it mainly got used for productivity and old DOS games such as BattleHawks 1942 and Super Solvers Midnight Rescue to name two. It never failed, but I ultimately upgraded the motherboard to a AMD K6/2 system and made a sleeper out of the case. Still had the floppy drives, ISA MFM controller and Miniscribe but I added a second HDD to expand storage a bit. Looked neat.

The second PC I kinda miss was the last one I remember seeing 'Made in USA' on the rear. It was a IBM PS/2 Model "Z" which had the same HDD as the second link (IBM Unique HDD sounds). Its only downsides were the MCA bus without any support for ISA cards, and no place to mount a CD-ROM drive in the case, as it only had enough slots to have one 1.44MB floppy drive and the other for the HDD faceplate. It was a 386SX system IIRC, so the only way I got it online was by using an external serial modem. For some reason Windows 95 refused to run on it. It had the required 4-8MB RAM, and 386 should have been a supported CPU, but install wasn't having none of it.

 

[mikedt]

The only Miniscribe I had experience with was the one in my old Vendex HeadStart Plus XT clone. It never failed, but I do miss that startup sound it made, whirrr whirrrr BEEP!

It also made satisfying sounds when busy. I had that PC from 1988 to about 2001 and it mainly got used for productivity and old DOS games such as BattleHawks 1942 and Super Solvers Midnight Rescue to name two. It never failed, but I ultimately upgraded the motherboard to a AMD K6/2 system and made a sleeper out of the case. Still had the floppy drives, ISA MFM controller and Miniscribe but I added a second HDD to expand storage a bit. Looked neat.

The second PC I kinda miss was the last one I remember seeing 'Made in USA' on the rear. It was a IBM PS/2 Model "Z" which had the same HDD as the second link (IBM Unique HDD sounds). Its only downsides were the MCA bus without any support for ISA cards, and no place to mount a CD-ROM drive in the case, as it only had enough slots to have one 1.44MB floppy drive and the other for the HDD faceplate. It was a 386SX system IIRC, so the only way I got it online was by using an external serial modem. For some reason Windows 95 refused to run on it. It had the required 4-8MB RAM, and 386 should have been a supported CPU, but install wasn't having none of it.

My main experience of Miniscribe was seeing pallet loads of these, been offered cheap at Traderdesk computer auctions in the early 90s.

This was circa 1993-94 after Miniscribe's much publicised bankruptcy, and when probably not so many still wanted MFM hard drives.

 

[nickdalzell]

I'd still love to see an MFM-to-SATA converter somewhere. They make the opposite, but not the one I want. I kinda feel it's wrong to make a retro PC run an SSD and be as quiet as a modern one. Quiet just feels so wrong. Computers should only be quiet when OFF.

But hey, Steve Jobs hated noise in computers as well, much to the ill-fate of the Apple ///

 

[ozonetrooper]

On my Win 7 desktop machine the spin up is growling when I bring it up. It sleeps most of the day and sometimes i will bump the mouse while working with the Win 10 machine and I know it is coming up by the sound from the tower ...

funny story, I worked for a state entity for several years and had a laptop on an air card that I used to control the environment in several public buildings, from my work truck.

I assigned sounds to the functions, like open file/close file/maximize/minimize/etc.

One day IT called me in for updates and after a day I was informed that I needed a new laptop.

I spoke with IT and asked what the problem was and told that the lappy was making all kinds of funny noises and they could not figure out why and for the protection of the state information on it, they were gonna err on the side of caution and issue me a new lappy.

After I informed them what I had done they removed all the sounds and returned the lappy and advised me not to do it again ...

 

[Hadron]

By this thread, I never intended to say I miss everything about 80s PCs. I just wish there were some method to at least use an old HDD in a modern system for small items like documents. It'd give me the sound back at least, which feels appropriate. I don't like PCs being unnervingly silent. It's just me, and again, I meant that I indeed miss the sound of the old hardware.

I never meant that you did, just that to me a noisy drive belongs in the same category as those other things we're better off without. Those sounds are evidence of inefficiency and of mechanical wear (may be gradual, but it's there), and a reminder that the drive is fragile. So to me they are things I don't want to hear.

Mind you I'm like that generally with equipment. An efficient machine is one that produces as little sound and heat as possible in its operation (not an original observation: Leonardo da Vinci understood that noise meant that energy was being wasted). And I'm afraid I'm one of those people who has always reacted to the sound of a sports car engine not with a "wow" but with a "that sounds inefficient" (actually all internal combustion vehicles are horrendously inefficient: only 20-30% of the energy released by burning fuel gets translated into motion). So for me one of the respects in which my current laptop is superior to its predecessors is that it is completely silent (the fan stays off unless I really push it, despite it being more powerful than its predecessors). Plus having no moving parts makes the storage device a lot less vulnerable even than a modern HDD, never mind one of those old ones (speaking as someone who never got out of the habit of tossing daysacks around even when they contain computers...).

 

[nickdalzell]

Oh you'd hate my home then. AM Tube radios, 1970s stereo Hifi, garage TV is a 1988 Zenith 30" CRT, and the newest tech in the home is this 2022 laptop and my 2022 smartphone. Everything else is from the years 1950-2012. (including the Kirby vacuum.)

I've had a retro fever ever since I used to stay at my great grandparents' home as a kid. Everything I had at my home was so new (well, to the standards of the early 1980s) but theirs was a time capsule to the 1950s-60s. They took care of everything they had, and appreciated what they had. I thought my digital clock radio was neat until I spotted their old GE flip clock. The rest is, well, history.

My home still uses incandescent lighting because the spectrum and PWM of LEDs gives me headaches or disrupts my sleep (if using them before bed, like in my living room while watching TV). I don't recall my electric bill going up from the retro tech. In fact, it's a few dollars lower because old tech is OFF when it's off (modern tech just goes into a low power 'standby') and the newer stuff tends to chat with the internet too often in the background and uses power there, as well.

 

[Hadron]

I have a bunch of 80s Hi-Fi gear rather than 70s, but I had to check whether AM radio still existed in the UK (it does, but the number of channels is on a downward slope). I don't recall when I last saw a CRT TV though: they used to be a useful way of explaining to students how a particle accelerator works, but as most 18-22 year olds don't remember them at all I've pretty much had to give that analogy up .

I'm not against retro per se, but for me it has to serve a purpose. So I can understand using retro camera gear (a more tactile experience, and manual focus can slow the process down and make it more considered) or Hi-Fi (tonal qualities, or just because it still works just fine and doesn't need replacing). But conversely I can't imagine using cassette tapes or VHS now because they are simply much lower quality than the systems that replaced them with no redeeming feature I can see. And I tend to feel the latter way about old computing equipment - though I've no doubt that to students I appear retro, since I use command line terminals more than graphical interfaces and set my trackpads to scroll in the traditional way (same direction as a scroll bar works) rather than reversed (like scrolling on a phone screen, which is the default setup these days).

 

[nickdalzell]

The only redeeming quality to VHS tapes I can see is they're like 10 cents per movie. As opposed to up to $19 per movie on blu-ray, or as high as $9 per movie on DVD. Plus tapes tend to outlive their disc counterparts.

It's that which keeps a VCR or two in my home. Another benefit is having the last, unmodified, unedited copy of the original Star Wars trilogy, which never got to have a DVD/Blu-Ray release.

I'm probably the youngest person who honestly prefers 8-track carts. I know they are bad about self-EOL'ing and I have yet to been able to successfully rewind one that got eaten by the player, but there's a lot of great 1970s country that never made it to compact cassette or CD, much less digital. For example there's an excellent Johnny Lee album I got on 8-track that isn't even available on any service to stream much less purchase. I've tried all of 'em, and that album has been lost to time. I can't even find it on vinyl. It might exist there but I have not yet come across it. The album is 'Bet your heart on me' by Johnny Lee. You can find the song, but not the album (and some of the songs on it were particular to that album.)

I also prefer CLI especially in Linux. I'm no fan of app stores anyway, especially Play Store that seems to intentionally limit my choices when looking for older apps (although Aptoide has come through on that front) and app stores to me are for morons who don't know how to properly download and install something, and always push updates down people's throats. Being totally opposed to updates hardcore means I hardly ever touch Play Store. I find it far more convenient and faster to type 'sudo apt-get install firefox' and let it happen instantly, and also far easier to download my preferred version of an Android APK (when it's actually an APK and not the stupid XAPK or now, APKM which don't do anything but error when tapping them) and just tap to install, and knowing Play Store can't touch it since it was downloaded off the web and oftentimes isn't even listed in Play Store because it's 10 plus years old.

I'm not a futurist. I don't believe one bit that 'new is always better' and I hate how homogenized everything has become, and choices being limited and fewer brands around now than ever before so you're stuck with Apple or Android, or Linux or Windows. Individuality and freedom of choice is becoming sadly obsolete in this 'new world order' and I just read about a 2035 ICE ban on cars. does that mean my Saturn ION and Honda Ridgeline are going to end up like my Thunderbolt? Perish the thought. I can't imagine my vehicle being just like every other one on the road. I really want to die vs. live in the future they want to create. My girlfriend lives 540 miles from me. If I'm forced in a few years to have an EV, I have to not only live with something that looks like every other out there, with tech I don't want in a car, plus the range of like 250 miles per trip followed by an 8 hour recharge period. I'd never see her again unless she moves in with me in the coming years. Sorry, Zuck, I'm not going to only love her via VR like you want. It's already bad enough I have to use an impractically large 6.5" display smartphone just to text her.

 

[Hadron]

To be fair the 2035 ban on ICE cars (it's 2030 over here) is a ban on sales of new ones, not on sales of gasoline to fuel them. But yes, they will become museum pieces at some point, and they have to: we need to phase the fossil fuel economy out, and faster than we are doing, because the laws of physics trump any ideological position or vested economic interest.

On the other hand 8 hours is only for domestic charging, you can charge many current model cars in 20-40 minutes with the right charger (and still cheaper than gasoline). And while there are no miracles in battery capacity there are developments that allow higher capacities and faster charging for the same mass and bulk as the current ones that are close to release, and one major Chinese manufacturer sells cars in China on a "battery lease" model, where you can simply drive into a battery changing station and drive out a few minutes later with a new, fully-charged one (though whether they can scale that solution to the degree necessary in the longer term remains to be seen). But of course any government thinking rationally about transport, rather than running scared of vested interests, would be planning for reducing the need for individual car use, since however you power them using 2 tonnes of metal to move each individual around is a ridiculously inefficient solution.

(My car still has an ICE, but probably only has another few years of life left in it. As BEV is still a developing technology, and components are scarce at the moment I'm hoping it will actually last that long before I have to replace it, but I also know that I will have absolutely zero regrets about ditching the ICE when that time comes.)

 

[nickdalzell]

the ICE ban is as dumb as the ban on incandescent bulbs. It won't fix the real issue which is that animal agriculture accounts for at least 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the world bank, and if you still cling to the USDA figure (which is like believing Phillip Morris with their denial of cigarette health problems back in the '50s, since the USDA is heavily invested in the meat and dairy industry) of 18%, that's still far more than all forms of transportation around.

Even if one didn't want to go vegan yet, the fact we get most of our items shipped from China or overseas isn't helping any efficiency record given ships and the fuel which powers them probably spew out a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere alone just to get folks that shiny new smartphone they crave or that cheap 'modern' furniture or other wares they order from Amazon.

It's just another case of chasing the wrong problem. It's going to result in no longer being able do drive far from your own hometown, certainly cross country trips won't be possible anymore, and distant relatives will probably have to Zoom each other or create a virtual persona in this Metaverse they want us all living in.

Sorry, that future is a hellscape. But Klaus Schwab has been drooling at the prospect of social credit systems, smart cities, and ensuring everyone remains in their little area and not being free any longer. It scares the hell out of me. That's the point though. it's not about climate change, it's about control, and we all know that the fat cats at the World Economic Forum will be excluded because they will still freely fly their private jets and drive their fancy gas and diesel vehicles and live in the forests just fine. They won't be impacted by what we will be. Everyone denies this as a crazy conspiracy theory but their plan is on their website plain as day, and he wrote a book about it called Covid 19: The Great Reset.

Anyone who buys into this is a fool. I refuse to participate in their bland non-individual culture where people have technology embedded into them and become more like Borg. I don't want to date a robot. If anything I want to be closer to nature not further from it. I refuse to own a vehicle that requires me to constantly pay money to the manufacturer because they won't allow self-repair and batteries can cost upwards of $7,000 (and no one looks at Cobalt Mining for Lithium either) and heaven forbid that you don't suffer a long-term power failure or you better get used to walking.

I've hated how we all live in a rent-only disposable society with things designed to be thrown away and replaced instead of simply replacing the battery in your phone, for example. I refuse to become part of any society who thinks that plan is sustainable enough to make cars into rentals and denying the ability to own one anymore. I would have to take a UV light to ensure the one some car-share got to me wasn't used recently on a high school trip to Romance Lane or something. Motels are disgusting enough now we might have cars that way.

My freedom means more to me than that. I live in the USA, and it's already turning into the USSR enough, and now this. I used to look to the future with optimism and wonder, now it just feels more like Black Mirror to me. I want no part of it.

 

[ozonetrooper]

John Kerry's private jet has a larger carbon footprint than my Harley Davidson !

 

[Hadron]

John Kerry's private jet has a larger carbon footprint than my Harley Davidson !

But you do know that the concept of an individual carbon footprint, and the term itself, was invented by the fossil fuel industry in order to shift attention away from their activities by putting responsibility onto individuals (though they were still actively funding global heating denial campaigns in parallel with this).

Sorry, that future is a hellscape. But Klaus Schwab has been drooling at the prospect of social credit systems, smart cities, and ensuring everyone remains in their little area and not being free any longer.

To be fair I remember representatives of the US tech industries being very keen on the idea of "smart cities" and the rest, or "panopticons" to give them the correct term, and they have far more power than that chap. They've been quieter about it lately, but that's probably because they realise that's too overt, and they can achieve the same result just by filling people's lives with surveillance tools as long as their lobbying can keep regulation of their activities at bay.