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Comment by binaryturtle | Hacker News Reader

Needs a recording of an Amiga reading in a floppy disk... and the floppy drive just waiting to be feed. Those were the sounds! :)

(The interface on the website is a bit confusing to use, IMHO)

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It is weird to think, computers are almost completely devoid of whirring nowadays. Other than the fan, and fans have gotten quite quiet. Floppies, CDs, hard drives. Tapes even (although I’m not that old).

It’s just kind of funny, I guess, the upcoming generation will never have the surprising “wow, my computer is silent” moment. I guess that was a one-time thing.

I tried to describe to my kid the sound of a 5.25" floppy disc the other day. MMWA MWA mmmmmm MWAMWA mmmmmmm.

He has seen 3.5" discs, but never the large floppies. His mind almost exploded when I talked about games needing 7 or 8 discs and hitting certain points where the game would pause while you put a new disc in.

I remember when the hard drive on my PowerMac 7200/90 started to fail (I was told that some of the ball bearings the platter rotated on were broken [0]). When the drive detected a 'wobble' on the platter, the entire computer would just power down with no warning at all - it was like the sound of a vacuum cleaner powering off. Silence and a blank screen that looked like a power cut, followed by that "oh sh!t" moment.

0. Note sure how true this was!

I love that Amiga emulators (FS/E/Win)UAE have an option to emulate the floppy drive sound. Very nostalgic, but also useful as an indication that something's happening!

Yes, there are two players, and often the bottom one plays and it's a different song than the one we selected, which is loaded in the top one.

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