Post #1498535

2026-04-21 15:03 UTC

Ah yes, and the turbo light. Offering the illusion of some vague notion of enhanced speed of some sort, somewhere inside box. I had a pc with a 486mhz processor and and a cordless phone with a 900mhz processor. Both communicated via the same copper wires. And don’t forget Napster. What a time to be alive and chat in the Microsoft network chat rooms.

Replies (4)

@JoMiran@lemmy.ml 2026-04-21 15:09

I never did AOL or MS chat. I was one of those Usenet and IRC degenerates. Oddly enough, it seems like the true sickos were in AOL/MSN all along.

Open ##1498729
@Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 2026-04-21 15:38

It had a purpose, wiki/Turbo_button. (But TIL some Pentium PC had the button.)

Open ##1499510
@mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-21 18:46

The Turbo button actually *slowed down* your processor for backwards compatibility reasons. Older software was expecting the CPU clock to be below a certain threshold, and would crash (or run way too fast) if the clock was too fast. Sort of like old games tying the physics to the framerate, then the physics gets all weird when the frame rate changes. The Turbo button was a way to boot old programs without needing to dig into your BIOS to downclock the CPU manually. Old games were especially bad about it. They’d rely on the CPU clock for in-game timing, so the game would basically run in super speed if the CPU clock was too fast. The Turbo button allowed you to slow the CPU down to make those games playable again.

Open ##1504674
@cenzorrll@piefed.ca 2026-04-21 15:53

The cordless phone was a 900MHz radio, not processor.

Open ##1504675