On Leaving your computer on 24H a day and mounting your machine sideways (1990) | Hacker News Reader

On Leaving your computer on 24H a day and mounting your machine sideways (1990)

textfiles.com

27 pointshggh8 comments

I'm embarrassed that I had to read halfway to realize that "sideways" actually meant _tower-style_ (i.e. the default configuration for most PCs today.) It's strange to think that "pizzabox" was the default for so long, and then it just... changed.

Yeah, that is hidden quite far down. The whole comment where it becomes clear is hilarious - heat trapped between cards, cards warping - I'm not sure if it really was so bad, or if the person is just making things up, but I assume the latter.

It was a nice monitor stand though, the pizzabox style.

You're right on the sudden change! I remember our 386 was sitting flat on the desk, and the (huuuge) 486 tower was upright below the desk.

Maybe something to do with the noise? Must have been quieter to hide the monster below a wood plank on a carpet to dampen the vibration, rather than on a resonating wood plank right in front of your face.

My favorite part about these old computers is that they didn't have an auto shutdown yet. You had to flip a big mechanical switch on the back, and that was very satisfying!

I loved having the computer flat under the monitor. I could access the drives, and power / reset buttons easily. However, I didn't like having to move the monitor to get inside my case. Once I got a tower, then I ended up using a stereo receiver under the monitor, which gave me easy access to volume and audio controls. I also remember having those big power "strips" under the monitor with the flickering orange toggle switches so you could control power to everything. Those were also glorious. Something nice about having all these controls right in front of you...

Now, having anything under the monitor drives me crazy, probably because it sits so much further back now that it's not a big honkin' CRT. The CRT was so big that it benefited you to have something underneath of it. Now I have all this empty desk space, which is really nice too.

I remember putting my lunch box on my desk one day and accidentally doing something that ejected the CD tray, nachos all over the office.

There was a brief time when the best setup was a keyboard drawer that was sturdy enough to have the PC on top of it and the 14" monitor on top of the PC. So, when you were done typing you pushed the drawer closed and reclaimed the desk surface in front of the PC.

It recommends reformatting a hard drive after changing orientation. First I’ve heard that one.

That's kind of odd because I think 1990 already had mostly IDE drives which really shouldn't need that. The much older MFM and RLL drives might have had more tracking issues and "format", but then also had huge tracks so even that sounds absurd to me.

I do recall that people used to worry about whether mounting drives sideways was going to affect the life of the bearings on the main axle spinning at 5400 RPM or what have you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com