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the paper: https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/Prelim_Disc_...

> 6.8.5 ... There should be some means by which the computer can signal to the operator when a computation has been concluded. Hence an order is needed ... to flash a light or ring a bell.

(later operators would discover than an AM radio placed near their CPU would also provide audible indication of process status)

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Similarly, on-board soundcards are notorious for this. Even in my relatively recent laptop I can judge activity by the noise in my headphones if I use the built-in soundcard, thanks to electrical interference. Especially on one motherboard I had, I could relatively accurately monitor CPU activity this way.

There's also audible noise that can sometimes be heard from singing capacitors[1] and coil whine[2], as mentioned in a sibling comment.

[1]: https://product.tdk.com/system/files/contents/faq/capacitors...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_induced_ac...

I jokingly refer to my GPU's coil whine as a HDD emulator as it sounds like a spinning disk to me.

Depending on workload my mainboard's VRMs (I think) sound like birds chirping.

The voltage regulators are really just buck converters[1], one per phase, and so contain both capacitors and inductors in a highly dynamic setting.

Thus they're very prone to the effects mentioned.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_converter

I have a dell laptop that makes a high pitched whine whenever I'm scrolling. really strange. GeForce RTX 2060.

The connection to scrolling is usually increased activity on the bus. CPU feeding the graphics card new bitmaps is just one source of that traffic. In a previous job, I could tell whether a 3-machine networking benchmark was still running based on the sound.

On my laptop the same thing happens, but only with one particular power supply connected. The noise itself definitely comes from the laptop though.

There was a Lenovo docking station compatible with the T420 (around 2012). The headphone Jack had shrieky noise on it whenever the Gigabit Ethernet connection got going. Took a while to figure that one out.

The other two docking stations were built differently and had the wires run somewhere else.

EDIT: Typo

I have experienced two or three computers in my life (and least one laptop) that produced barely audible sound when CPU activity changed. The most memorable was a PowerBook G4 with a touchpad, and as I slid my finger slowly across the pad in a quiet enough room, I could hear kind of a tick each time the pointer moved a pixel.

Still happens to me when using software that is GPU intensive, like Blender. When I drag a slider, I hear the buzzing of the GPU.

That's not what's being described in this thread. You're referring to fan noise; the other comments are discussing electrical interference.

Not necessarily. My GPU audibly sings in the KhZ range whenever it comes off idle, a long time before the fans actually start up. It could be electrical noise from the fan drivers and/or motor coils if they're running at low speed, but it's definitely not the sound of air movement. And if you're e.g. processing photos on the GPU, you can hear it starting and stopping, exactly synced to the progress of each photo in the UI.

This was very common with first sound cards (at least on PC). As I remember, only with Creative Sound Blaster, completely finished era of continuous hearing of "machine soul" sounds.

My favourite was troubleshooting an already ancient original IBM XT in 1992... The operator was complaining about the screen giving her headaches.

Sure enough - when I went onsite to assist, that "green" CRT was so incredibly wavy, I could not understand how she could do her job at all. First thing I tried was moving it away from the wall, in-case I had to unplug it to replace.

It stopped shimmering and shifting immediately. Moved it back - it started again.

That's when we realised that her desk was against a wall hiding major electrical connectivity to the regional Bell Canada switching data-centre on the floors above her.

I asked politely if she could have her desk moved - but no... that was not an option...

... So - I built my first (but not last) solution using some tin-foil and a cardboard box that covered the back and sides of her monitor - allowing for airflow...

It was ugly - but it worked, we never heard from her again.

My 2nd favourite was with GSM mobile devices - and my car radio - inevitably immediately before getting a call, or TXT message (or email on my Blackberry), if I was in my car and had the radio going, I would get a little "dit-dit-dit" preamble and know that something was incoming...

(hahahaha - I read this and realise that this is the new "old man story", and see what the next 20-30 years of my life will be, boring the younglings with ancient tales of tech uselessness...)

I remember this happening all the time in meetings. Every few minutes, the conversation would stop because a phone call was coming in and all the conference room phones started buzzing. One of those things that just fades away so you don't notice it coming to an end.

The “GSM chirp”. I never got to hear it much because my family happened to use CDMA phones in that era, but I do remember hearing it a few times. I know it was well known.

I haven’t thought about that in a long time.

At a certain large tech company, at the peak of GSM data-capable phones (eg Palm Treo, Blackberry) it was accepted practice for everyone turn off data or leave their phone on a side table due to conference speaker phones on the tables amplifying the data.

Also, during this era I was on a flight and the pilot came over the PA right before pushing from the gate saying exasperatedly "Please turn your damn phones off!" (I assumed the same RF noise was leaking into his then-unsheilded headset).

I had an IBM in a Electrical Generating Station that had a HUGE 480 volt 3 phase feed not far from the monitor in the next room. The display would swirl about 1/2 of an inch at quite a clip.

The solution I picked was to put the machine in Text/Graphics mode (instead of normal character rom text mode, this was back in the MS-DOS days), so the vertical sync rate then matched up with the swirling EM fields, and there was almost zero apparent motion.

Many years ago, I was a user of an IBM 1130 computer system. It filled a small room, with (as I recall) 16K 16-bit words and a 5MB disk drive, which was quite noisy. I would feed in my Fortran program, then head down to the other end of the building to get coffee. The computer would think about the program for a while, and then start writing the object file. This was noisy enough that I'd hear it, and head back to the computer room just in time to see the printer burst into action.

(Please feel free to reference the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. But this really happened.)

Ahh… the good old days. Usually when I walked all the way to the computer center to pick up my printout, it would say “syntax error on line 1”.

The. I had to walk all the way back to the terminal room, and was a lot more careful the next time.

Some computers ship with an implementation of this using inductor coils which whine depending on the load :D

I remember doing this back on the IBM 1130. We didn't see that there was any value in using it as a monitor.

Much of my earliest computer experience was on an 1130 clone, the General Automation 18/30. Never did the AM radio thing, but you could see what phase the Fortran compiler was up to just by the general look of the blinkenlights.

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