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Ah yes, and the turbo light. Offering the illusion of some vague notion of enhanced speed of some sort, somewhere inside box.
I had a pc with a 486mhz processor and and a cordless phone with a 900mhz processor. Both communicated via the same copper wires.
And don't forget Napster. What a time to be alive and chat in the Microsoft network chat rooms.
The cordless phone was a 900MHz radio, not processor.
And it was a 80486 model CPU. Probably at 25MHz.
I have a 486 DX4 that runs at 100mhz. It was faster than the contemporary Pentium that ran at 80mhz. Though this was one of the last 486s and later Pentiums hit higher speeds.
I had that one too!
It had a 25MHz bus and the processor quadrupled that to 100MHz in its turbo mode: hence the 4 in DX4.
Either way, it certainly wasn't a 486MHz CPU ;-)
The Turbo button actually slowed down your processor for backwards compatibility reasons. Older software was expecting the CPU clock to be below a certain threshold, and would crash (or run way too fast) if the clock was too fast. Sort of like old games tying the physics to the framerate, then the physics gets all weird when the frame rate changes. The Turbo button was a way to boot old programs without needing to dig into your BIOS to downclock the CPU manually.
Old games were especially bad about it. They’d rely on the CPU clock for in-game timing, so the game would basically run in super speed if the CPU clock was too fast. The Turbo button allowed you to slow the CPU down to make those games playable again.
Gonna add a turbo button to my PC that does nothing except light up an LED and turn on a really loud fan.
Silverstone has a retro case with turbo button: https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chassis/flp02/ It spins up all fans when you press it
Why in the hell did they call it "turbo" when it's literally the opposite
Turbo was the default behavior. There was a toggle button that turned off the turbo light and slowed the machine down when needed for compatibility. Note: almost nobody needed this capability it sometimes they bumped the button and later wondered why the pc was slow.
Reminds me of why NASA had to rename the thing that went over astronaut's private part to large, gigantic, and humongous because nobody woud pick small and normal.
The previous user isn't wrong per se, but just to clarify: if the indicator light is on, the "turbo" (default) mode is on and the device is running at full performance. Turbo off means it's downclocked.
It's more a misnomer to call it turbo when in fact it's just the standard speed of the device, while the mode that is actually toggled using the turbo button is what causes it to run slower for compatibility reasons.
I never did AOL or MS chat. I was one of those Usenet and IRC degenerates. Oddly enough, it seems like the true sickos were in AOL/MSN all along.
Met my wife on IRC. We should go back to Usenet.
It's still around!
Back in 85, they thought 2015 sounds futuristic enough for hoverboards and self lacing shoes.
I mean, self lacing shoes is really not hard to do. We could have them now. It's just impractical (and potentially dangerous) to put motors, sensors, and a battery in the article of clothing that takes the most impact, experiences the most wear and tear, and it's in closest proximity to puddles of all your clothing items when elastic exists and serves well enough for casual wear.
I think the implication is that they figured out how to do it without all that stuff using vague future tech
The self drying jacket also suggests that it was some kind of fabric smart tech. There is a bunch of small ideas in the movie that did come true.
has an endurance of up to 6 minutes
Now we can dream that one day hoverboarding will move beyond being the premature ejaculation of recreational activities
I repeat, and will continue to repeat until it is no longer necessary: where. is. my. god damned. HOVERBOARD!?
They were pretty close to the mark on President Biff though.
I always loved the Conan O’Brien “In the year 2000” bit, and it got even funnier after it actually was 2000.
No, the other mediocre evening show host, that Colbert fella
It's funny because that was 12 years ago!
IIRC, the Jetsons came back to the past to sue everyone for ignoring climate change? I just remember them having to walk rather than use a moving walkway and taking a whole day to reach Harvey's desk. Man, what an awesome show!
thejetsons.fandom.com/Back_to_the_Present (??):
In the far off year of 2002, the Jetsons live in their luxurious, futuristic house high above the Earth's surface. Their lives are suddenly turned upside down when the water level begins rising at an alarming rate. Global warming caused the ice caps to melt, and the Earth to become nothing but water. Suddenly, mutants begin breaking into the house, which is unable to get high enough to be out of the water's reach.
It's funny because that was 12 years ago!
They kept doing it for years after 2000
I want to go back to that future. Remember when we had hope?
We still can! Technology keeps improving. Any social progress whatsoever could yield huge gains in the average person's quality of life, because so much is currently squandered on the wealthy.
Seems like social progress is harder than building as mass market compatible flying car or whatever ...
When we believed the future would be better.
Now when we looked at the future we see climate change, rise of fascism some the world, destruction of the biodiversity ...
back in the 1900s
Welp, guess I'm watching Bojack Horseman the whole way through again.
Don't act like you don't know
now they just put a bunch of adjectives around the product's name
New Super Phone U Deluxe Pro Max AI
New Super Phone U Deluxe Pro Max AI
Also make number go up!
EDIT: Every year! With less features than last year! Because fuck you! That's why! You miserable plebs!
It’s still the future. 2000 is when we’ll have flying cars. By 2001 we’ll go to space in ships with retro 70s interiors and find an obelisk that makes you hallucinate.
We never reached the promised (now retro-)futurism of the distant year 2000.
We keep surpassing ourselves in that regard.
Despite the evidence artists retain (sell?) all that hope of the brighter future.
Even doomer fiction keeps falling short.
The literary subgenre of cyberpunk, including the Cyberpunk TTRPG (1980's), got a lot of it right.
Yeah, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson probably got about as much right as Aldous Huxley or George Orwell
Growing up we had exclusively Gateway 2000 computers. When it came time I bought a Gateway laptop. Best computer I ever had. Shortly after it sold to what was eventually Walmart and became a nothing brand. But I had a Gateway. I grew up with Gateway. It was the future. Cows. Now it's less than nothing.
Judge Dredd has entered the chat
He was featured in a comic called '2000 AD'
Still is.
Let’s all meet up in the year 2000
won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?