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The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble (www.latimes.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] macrocephalic 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Actually you pressed it and everything got 2x slower. Turbo was a stupid label for it.

[–] Regrettable_incident 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I could be misremembering but I seem to recall the digits on the front of my 486 case changing from 25 to 33 when I pressed the button. That was the only difference I noticed though. Was the beige bastard lying to me?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lying through its teeth.

There was a bunch of DOS software that runs too fast to be usable on later processors. Like a Rouge-like game where you fly across the map too fast to control. The Turbo button would bring it down to 8086 speeds so that stuff is usable.

[–] Regrettable_incident 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Damn. Lol I kept that turbo button down all the time, thinking turbo = faster. TBF to myself it's a reasonable mistake! Mind you, I think a lot of what slowed that machine was the hard drive. Faster than loading stuff from a cassette tape but only barely. You could switch the computer on and go make a sandwich while windows 3.1 loads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh, yeah, a lot of people made that mistake. It was badly named.

[–] Regrettable_incident 1 points 2 months ago

TIL, way too late! Cheers mate

[–] takeda 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Actually you used it correctly. The slowdown to 8086 speeds was applied when the button was unpressed.

When the button was pressed the CPU operated at its normal speed.

On some computers it was possible to wire the button to act in reverse (many people did not like having the button be "on" all the time, as they did not use any 8086 apps), but that was unusual. I believe that's was the case with OPs computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It varied by manufacturer.

Some turbo = fast others turbo = slow.

[–] somethingsnappy 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That's... the same thing.

Whops, I thought you were responding to the first child comment.