Turbo Speed...!

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

So...here's another story from the days gone by, back in the early 90's, when I worked in that little computer shop in Kingsport, TN.

We were still selling 486's at this point.  Memory (30 pin!) was still about $50 a *MEG*, and hard drives were barely making it up to 800mb.  We were using DOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

Many folks still had a 286 or 386 machine at this time.  This is a story about a 386.

Customer had brought it in, because something had happened and the entire machine had slowed to a crawl.  Even in DOS, it was slower than a 1 legged wingless chicken trying to cross the interstate. 

We were particularly busy at the time (I think it was around Christmas time) so our store owner / manager, a good computer tech himself, decided to work on it.   At the time, I was away from the store doing a new delivery / install.  When I returned 2 hours later, manager was STILL having fits with this computer.   I asked him what he'd tried, and he explained that he had tried formatting the drive and doing a fresh install of DOS;  Swapping out memory; Replacing the CPU.   He'd even hooked up a spare powersupply to see if somehow the voltage was whacked on the original.

All to no avail.   He was stumped.  He was frustrated.  He was visibly perturbed. 

So...I walked over to the machine...looked at it for about 5 seconds...and pressed the turbo button on the front of the case.

Man, those old 386 machines sure do work faster when the turbo button isn't turned on, don't they?    *big evil grin*

/me gives points to people who actually remember those!

(Oh, and at that point, my manager goes stark white, followed by bright red, and storms off muttering to himself...!)

*giggles*  Made my day...



-Az

Comments

[soruk.livejournal.com]

Those were the days. ;)

In my student days my homebuilt 386 (from spare parts, P133s were current machines) had the turbo switch disconnected and replaced with a jumper on the motherboard.

I mean, what was the point of running your shiny new 386DX40 at speeds that an inebriated worm could outdo?

[tripartite.livejournal.com]

To make old games playable. :)

[jecook]

The last machine I had that had a turbo button on it did nothing but change the speed display on it from "66" to "HI".

I think the Compu-desk shall have another useless button that says "Ludicrous Speed" pasted on it... and if I get really creative, it'll be setup to play that sound bite. :)

(Hell, I'm looking at getting an EPO style button to use as the power button... or hack an Easy Button, whichever's funnier.)

[liber-cogito.livejournal.com]

I remember being like, 10...and wondering why pressing turbo made it slower.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

"magic"

"more magic"

Anyone know that one?

[flexor.livejournal.com]

Och aye. Me is an Old Fart who had a blindingly fast 386 machine with EIGHT MB of RAM. DIP memory. Proper chips, they were. As I recall, the sole reason for that turbo button's existence was to under-clock the CPU to 4.7MHz so the game sprites in the older games wouldn't go whizzing by. Just try telling that to the kids now heh!

At some point, I must try to dig up Commander Keen! See if I can remember where the Blastola Cola was.

ObGrumpy: Has anyone noticed that, while we now have 4GHz CPUs rather than 4MHz, the sub-second response times we used to have on the machines are now a thing of the past?

[jecook]

I could do that too, I suppose...

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

Mac Plus vs. AMD Dual Core (http://hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins)

[dkphoenix.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I remember the turbo button. I also remember getting my first 1.2 gig Connor hard drive, and thinking what a decadent amount of space that was.

[canray.livejournal.com]

I remember those. We had one at the Library I worked that. It was an old 386 Box (It was gutted and replaced with newer parts. The Leasing company was cheap).

It was hilarious watching people continually push the Turbo button trying to make the InterWeb go faster. :-D

I feel old now... :-S

[vortex.livejournal.com]

Remember?

I think I still have parts of one or two down in the basement somewhere!...

[zonga.livejournal.com]

OMG, I REMEMBER THE TURBO BUTTON. I still have my old upgraded 386 to a cobbled together "486" sitting in the back of my closet. Man, I miss Print Shop Deluxe.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I used to own a 286 with a Turbo button *and* a SOTA accelerator card, thus having FOUR speeds to run Wing Commander at!

[jethro.livejournal.com]

I actually had to use the turbo button to make my machine run slower to play one game or else the game ran so fast you couln't follow the action. I think it was called Qix. You had to trap this energy field in a box as you claimed more and more of the screen.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

"Your computer is slow because you have too many TSRs running!"

[eliz.livejournal.com]

Oh wow-- I just remember having my 286 and never turning turbo OFF because it just crawled without it.

I think the turbo took it from like 5 to 11 mHz... oh back in the days that a 20 meg hard drive was THE BOMB. And more than you'd ever use... ha ha ha.

I miss Print Shop Deluxe too.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHA, I remember trying to play a Pong-type game with the Turbo on. ROFL.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

particularly Baby Bounce. ;-)

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

How long it's been since I had to hear "TSR", let alone shuffle the load and loadhigh orders to eek out a little more space than the automatic process gave us... What was the name of the auto loadhigh configuration routine?

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Well, sure. For those not similarly informed, behold (http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html).

Our local equivalent is the ANSI Standard Rubber Chicken, which we used to keep our VAX running some years ago. The box just kept crashing, for no apparent reason. In desperation, we began waving said rubber chicken at it during reboot, and it finally stayed up. Not wishing to tempt fate, someone ran off to get a wire and we suspended the rubber chicken over the touchy VAX. It stayed there for months, and the system stayed up the whole time. And, as you might expect, some damned fool decided to take it down. And, as you must also expect by now, the VAX keeled over seconds afterwards. We chastised the aforementioned damned fool, put the ASRC back, and rebooted. VAX stayed up, no worries, never had another crashed, and was decomissioned without incident some years later. We still keep the ASRC in the server room, against possible future need.

[stimpy.livejournal.com]

memmaker as far as I can remember

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Hah, I remember the Turbo button on my old 286. Enabling it had the effect of boosting sped from 10MHz to a blistering 12MHz! It was like I was in the Maxell commercial, I tells ya.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

I still have Print Shop Deluxe on floppies in a disk holder I kept around for sake of nostalgia. It also houses all the pirated games I downloaded (slowly) about a decade and a half ago. Doom, Doom 2, all the old Space Quest games, Dune, Dune 2, Castle of Dr. Brain, Monkey Island (!), Eye of the Beholder 1-3 and the like. I have an old K6-based machine that I got for free running Win95 specifically so I can play that stuff should it strike my fancy.

And no, that machine is most assuredly not anywhere near any type of online access...

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Aye, loadhigh or lh starting with DOS 5, and memmaker automated the process for DOS 6.0+. 386Max was a third-party option that did the same thing (poorly). Stolen from an old pre-6.0 autoexec.bat of mine:

device=c:\dos\himem.sys
device=c:\dos\emm386.exe noems
devicehigh=ansi.sys
dos=umb
prompt $P$G
set sound=c:\sbawe32
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0
C:\SBAWE32\DIAGNOSE /S
C:\SBAWE32\AWEUTIL /S
C:\SBAWE32\SB16SET /P /Q
loadhigh C:\DOS\MSCDEX /d:NECCD /m:10 /v
loadhigh C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE 4096 2048
loadhigh C:\TVGA\VESA.EXE
SET MOUSE=C:\MOUSE
loadhigh C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.EXE

Why I keep this shit I'll never know.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Old DOS versions of Print Shop Deluxe are classified as abandonware now. Haul out the old thing, and have fun (http://www.vetusware.com/download/PrintShop%20Deluxe/?id=3758).

Nostalgia FTW.