Originally posted by: chuckywang
a TURBO button???
*raises hand*
Originally posted by: D1gger
Originally posted by: chuckywang
a TURBO button???
*raises hand*
Yup. I never understood why I would want to run it at less than "turbo" speed.
Originally posted by: D1gger
Yup. I never understood why I would want to run it at less than "turbo" speed.
Originally posted by: geecee
I remember having to turn it off to play some games, otherwise I would've had to have bionic reflexes.
Originally posted by: AMCRambler
We had them at my high school. 486 Dx2's with a little digital LED that would scroll up the mhz when you punched the button. I still don't really get how you could over clock while the machine was running. Nowadays you have to make your bus speed changes in the bios and reboot. With this you could be booted into DOS and the turbo button would still work. I think the machines were running Windows 3.1, but you had to load it by command at the prompt. Most of the apps we worked with were DOS based so we didn't do much in Windows. The best was when we had game day and the teacher would let us play Doom 2 on the LAN. I think it was like up to 6 people could get in a game. Beat the crap outta dialing up your friend on a 56k.
Originally posted by: dullard
It underclocked your CPU when you wanted to go slower. That is, your CPU was at a higher speed than most programs were intended to run on, and thus these poorly written programs would be unusable. You could press the button (turn off turbo) and then run those programs without problem.
Back then, programs were usually written to do the next line of code as soon as the computer is ready. Only later did programs get more sophisticated and were told to wait until the clock reached a certain time to do that code.
Consider a typical golf program. You pressed a button to start the backswing and released it to stop the swing (and hit the ball with that amount of power). On a slow computer, that would take 1-2 seconds. But on a faster computer it may take 0.5 seconds -- too fast for a player to accurately do the motions. Thus, you'd turn off the turbo, slow down your computer, and make the program usable again.
Originally posted by: FeuerFrei
Yes my first pc in 1996 did.
Here at work the other day I found a keyboard with a Turbo key. If anyone knows what's up with that, hit reply.
Originally posted by: chuckywang
a TURBO button???
*raises hand*
Originally posted by: TheGizmo
yep.. my Leading Edge 386 16MHz, 40 megabyte harddrive, 3600 baud modem, had a turbo... all for a cheap $1400 , i don't remember how fast it made it go though. that ****** was pimp though.. with the 640x480 resolution COLOR 14 inch diagnol monitor.... ahh the good old days.