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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Walking past computers in Starfield you hear them making hard drive noises and I realized I miss that.

It's great how quiet computers are now, but there was something to being able to hear the computer thinking too.

Watching them again recently, I was struck by how well the set and prop design of Alien and Aliens sold the idea of an industrial sci fi future.

Something about all those chunky CRT or VFD screens fiercely glowing feels, to me, much better and futuristic than, say the sleek transparent holographic flatscreens of the new Star Trek properties.

Space trucking, right? Not fancy but resilient and sufficiently functonal.

? That was just an unimaginative take on the current state of computers. Don't get me wrong, I love the vibe, they are some of my favorite movies, but it seems like lack of imagination rather than trying at all.

Here, put this on in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0

As a kid i was told, that a CPU works by many tiny switches being turned on and off blazingly fast.

So i interpreted the HDD seeking noise as the sound of those switches. :D

I remember I could recognize the sound floppy disk drives made when they encountered read error, so I knew before the error message appeared that I had to go copy the floppy again :)

Combine that with the speakers picking up a GSM call setup sequence before the phone actually rang, and you were pretty much clairvoyant.

I'm glad I grew up hearing floppy disks, hard drives seek, cd drives spin and most importantly, a modem establish a connection.

Silence is nice too though.

Honestly, all the silence has made me more wary of computer temperatures.

I never used to be able to hear the fans, but now that everything is solid state, they're the one constant. And it worries me occasionally when they kick on for no discernable reason.

That modem sequence is probably one of the most memorable pieces of a whole generation's childhood. If you ask me now, when it's been over two decades since I've heard it, I would easily be able to badly reproduce the whole 30 second soundbite with my voice from memory. With confidence I could probably nail every single beep and boop including the pauses between them and the odd static sound near the end of the whole process.

I used to invite mates over and move my hand like a wizard to change the frequency of the tones, not letting on that I'd memorised the whole sound sequence by rote and was messing with them.

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