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Comment by dr_kiszonka | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but they don't emulate the smells, the sound of fans spinning up and the gentle breeze they generate, the beeps and boops, the tick tick tick hard drives make, the long travel of keys on that old keyboard with a slightly sticky shift (gotta be from that coffee I spilled in '97).

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I miss the scraping hard drive noises with a flickering “HDD” light and a mysterious “Turbo” indicator when my 90s PC had to work hard

Turbo was all about slowing down a 486-/Pentium-class machine to work with programs and some ISA cards that required a slower CPU and/or XT bus speeds.

wait... so turbo made it slower?

De-pressing turbo made the computer slower. Pressing it made the computer run at its normal speed.

FS-UAE emulates even the floppy/HD head sounds and scrapping the media too.

These were all very nice, and reminiscent of the time

Then you remember you need to install Windows 9x or 2000 on it and the CD-ROM reader is kinda flaky, and you barely can download anything with IE 6, so now you would need an TLS bridge or use a usb-drive. Oh yeah and don't forget you need a small partition formatted on FAT32

Yes, but old computers also do not do that, because they no longer work. (And if they do, it's not with some 30 year old hard drive.) Maybe 80% of the working computers I have put on the shelf do not even boot after a few years. It's a fair question, I think. Maybe electronics just lose their spirit.

Or that click of death that plagued zip drives.

My Dell had one in college. Everyone thought it was cool until the click-CLICK click-CLICK. Dell replaced it twice. Then I gave up. When did I ever really need to transfer 100MB anyway?

The click of death was transferrable via a disk having been damaged by a drive with the c-o-d, that's why 'replacing the drive' wasn't really a solution, you'd need to also throw all your zip disks and buy new.

Basically, it was a hardware virus.

Game speed too.

Simh does.

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