861
submitted 1 week ago by grid11@lemy.nl to c/technology@lemmy.world
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 85 points 1 week ago

My only real hope out of this is that that copilot button on keyboards becomes the 486 turbo button of our time.

[-] BlackLaZoR@fedia.io 48 points 1 week ago

Meaning you unpress it, and computer gets 2x faster?

[-] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 week ago

I was thinking pressing it turns everything to shit, but that works too. I'd also accept, completely misunderstood by future generations.

[-] yokonzo@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Well now I wanna hear more about the history of this mystical shit button

[-] macrocephalic@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago

Back in those early days many applications didn't have proper timing, they basically just ran as fast as they could. That was fine on an 8mhz cpu as you probably just wanted stuff to run as fast as I could (we weren't listening to music or watching videos back then). When CPUs got faster (or it could be that it started running at a multiple of the base clock speed) then stuff was suddenly happening TOO fast. The turbo button was a way to slow down the clock speed by some amount to make legacy applications run how it was supposed to run.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Most turbo buttons never worked for that purpose, though, they were still way too fast Like, even ignoring other advances such as better IPC (or rather CPI back in those days) you don't get to an 8MHz 8086 by halving the clock speed of a 50MHz 486. You get to 25MHz. And practically all games past that 8086 stuff was written with proper timing code because devs knew perfectly well that they're writing for more than one CPU. Also there's software to do the same job but more precisely and flexibly.

It probably worked fine for the original PC-AT or something when running PC-XT programs (how would I know our first family box was a 386) but after that it was pointless. Then it hung on for years, then it vanished.

load more comments (11 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
861 points (97.4% liked)

Technology

58062 readers
3080 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS