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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Lovely that a simple device stood the test of time like that :) polished plastic is often great (except on thinkpad keyboards).

Also it's fun to see that 128MB to me still feels more impressive than 48GB

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It's funny how one gets stuck on things like that. In between my family's 286 and our first Pentium, we didn't upgrade. Consequently, there's a part of me that still believes the 386, with its awesome Turbo button, to be unattainable high-end technology.

It is, it imprints the mystical wonder of your understanding at the time and the effects it has on you (first video game, first 16bit game, first 3d game, fps or rts) and it's there forever.

For me it’s my first experience with a 16 bit game console - the Sega Genesis (if I am not wrong). Played Final Fight at my friends place and I still cannot rate any gaming experience higher than that. I have since tried playing Final Fight again, but it’s not the same.

I spent so much time on this topic. And there are some 'firsts' that don't hold up to the magic they had. But some, even though they don't shine as much, still have surprising balance/depth/quality.

For instance, Resident Evil games, have a mood that is unparalleled (I'm exagerating a bit but you get the idea). It's blocky, slow, ridiculous technically for any next gen standards.. but the mood is so on point it makes the game worth it.

It’s similar for me and the Pentium III 600E with 128MB RDRAM and 10k cheetah drive + 21 inch CRT. Will never forget the day my boss dropped that bad boy on my desk. It was a HP Kayak and was such a leap in speed and capability (I was a multimedia producer at the time) that I still think in my minds eye that it’s the fastest machine I have ever used.

This kind of perception fixed in time is why eBay prices on vintage computers are so expensive. I feel it too, and own many vintage Macs because of it.

Turbo buttons weren't only a 386 thing. They existed way before. Even some XT clones had them.

My Compaq XT didn’t have the button, but there was a magic key combination that would change the colour of an LED on the front panel. AN LED THAT CHANGED COLOUR!!!

Ohhhh the turbo button. I remember that from our first 486DX2. The case had an oddly satisfying neon green segmented LCD display for CPU frequency that would drop from 50 to 25 if you disengaged the switch. Why anyone would ever willingly do so is still beyond me.

>> Why anyone would ever willingly do so is still beyond me

Some games had animations based on frames, not time between frames. So they where unplayable without reducing frequency

From my very vague memory, Reader Rabbit was one such game that was unplayable at a higher CPU frequency.

One day I switched off turbo while playing Test Drive 3.

Suddenly, I didn't need superhuman reflexes to play, and could drive on curves at speed :-D

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