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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.

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It's ironic that the mass adoption of SSDs also coincides with the gradual disappearance of HDD activity lights on laptops, because with a completely silent SSD the light becomes the only way to know if the machine is slow because of heavy disk activity or something else. Nonvisual/"side-channel" cues are extremely useful for understanding what's happening.

I suppose it's similar to the situation with newer cars, where the engine is so quiet that one sometimes forgets whether it's even on, and attempts to start it again. There have even been laws introduced to make sure that cars can be heard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8925126

I find indicator lights, if they only have the purpose of conveying something that's already obvious in some other way (e.g. "the computer is on"-led plus a monitor that's clearly saying it is) fairly useless. I'm glad that most devices nowadays don't have them and are completely dark even when they're on.

And to your comment about cars, it seems to be more about pedestrians that can know about an oncoming vehicle and less about whether the user thinks it's running. The latter seems to be something that can be easily fixed.

The flip side is status lights to show something is off.

The indicators are normally not used, but when they are, they're very useful. When the screen is off on a laptop, is it because the whole machine is off, just sleeping, the video output is set to external, or something wrong happened? I've had to use a laptop where the POST was unusually long, and without the power LED I would've probably accidentally turned it off again because I would think I hadn't pressed the power button hard enough, and try pressing it again.

I remember that noise. I blame Microsoft more than the hardware. From 1984 to about 1994, Macintoshes were my main computer, and they didn't make noise just for moving the mouse or opening a menu. Later, I ran Ubuntu on a computer that used to run Windows XP. The noise and latency that Windows had, just for opening a menu or folder, were replaced by silence and instant action. (Just to be clear, of course all three had to spin the hard drive when I did something major, like opening a file or program. But Windows is the only one where all interactions were erratic.)

I agree that it wasn't due to the hardware. It's just that today's hardware has gotten so fast that even Microsoft products seem to run almost smoothly.

And in fact, you still get that noise and activity light on Windows 10 and a spinning-rust HD! On a system that wouldn't even manage to use the RAM completely while running on a sensible Linux install, let alone filling RAM up or swapping to disk.

I mean, swapping used to be a fact of life in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even on Linux - RAM was just too cramped back then. But then we got machines with lots and lots of RAM even at the low end, and Linux became snappy and quiet-- while Windows is still as bad as ever.

This — constant swapping — is what drove me to Linux. Though, the laptop I am typing this on is still using 16/32 GiB of RAM, mostly due to the "modern" web. (But that's not any operating system's fault.)

RAM is, I feel, one of the more precious commodities on a machine, still. I have spinning rust in my machines (more space/$), and I've not regretted it, or really had a need for the speed an SSD could bring. (If anything, I think I'd do a hybrid install, with a small SSD and a large HDD.) But I've never once regretted upgrading RAM on a machine, and I definitely miss it on my work MBP.

I once measured the energy usage of opening the start menu on Windows 2000. It was about 40 Watt seconds.

My HD light on my laptop still flashes endlessly. I wish it flashed brighter when it was doing more work, letting me know the resource intensive task I just initiated was happening... in some way.

But the grind of the hard drive when something happens. I never would have thought of that again had you not made this comment. Crazy nostalgia there.

I never would have thought of that again had you not made this comment. Crazy nostalgia there

So there's this notion in video gaming where you're strolling through a forest or in a cave or factory or some sort of level with no enemies, no battle music, but you suddenly find yourself upon ammo crates and health packs.

Indicator that a big fight was about to happen.

For me and my early voyages through computing, learning how to write little programs and messing about with settings to see what they did, if I ever got stuck on a problem it was THAT noise that told me "hey you're onto something here".

What a time.

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