I guess that’s why they call it “booting”
I can still hear/feel the gradual effect followed with the iconic “click”
And all the loud noises of the giant components used to be in such PCs 🤭
Do people not still do this? People must still have towers, and they must have on buttons, right?
I’ve not built a tower in a good few years now so maybe I’m out of touch and they’re all voice activated now or use DNA scanners from Gattaca idk xD
People tend to have laptops these days, only gamers need towers but gamers don’t want their PC to be Vacuum cleaner neither.
People learned that computer cases shouldn’t go on the ground, unless you want them to be a dust magnet (especially if you have a case with intakes on the bottom for the GPU).
I have a tower but it’s on my desk (and the button is on the top facing the ceiling) so using my foot to turn it in would be a slight issue lol
Flexibility training.
Never put your PC on the floor unless it’s your company’s shitty workstation tower that really needs to be replaced.
I got one of those Mac minis and the button is on the bottom!
Apple is pretty shitty at design though especially for a company so renowned for design haha.
I have a bunch of mini Linux computers too and they have mostly normal buttons but they are tiny. Probably too tiny for toes.
I still do, why should it have changed?
Button is on the top now 😔
And too small for my big ass toe
More people use laptops (or even tablets or smartphones) more of the time nowadays, so fewer people turn on their devices that way nowadays.
I still use my toes for my laptop but the people in my office are so weird about it
Kids these days with their 5% overclocks.
Back in my day we had 100% overclocks!

Turbo bumped my 8MHz 386 to sixteen megahertz
It never got switched off, except in some games that a slower CPU made easier (some games back then ran just as fast as the hardware could run them, expecting the computers or turn to be the state of the art) By the time of the machine in the picture unturbo wasn’t enough so we used a TSR* program called goSlow to get specific performance
*Terminate, Stay Resident; a program that could run in the background
66 MILES PER HOUR!
You might have meant it as a joke but just in case someone else isn’t aware, this button actually made your CPU slower 🤓
Depends on the motherboard version. On later ones, the turbo actually worked to make your PC faster.
As far as I understand, it’s purely marketing semantics.
The point of the ‘Turbo’ button is to slow the CPU down to provide compatibility with old software that was written with a fixed clockspeed, where the software would become unusably fast on newer CPUs.
Calling this a “slow” mode or “compatibility” mode wasn’t very marketing-sexy however, so manufacturers just flipped it around and called the normal speed ‘Turbo’.
With later systems, developers all became aware that varying CPU frequencies were a thing, and started to base their software timings on the realtime clock instead.
So in later systems there was no longer any need to have the CPU run at anything other than its maximum (normal) speed - and the turbo button simply went away.
…we had finally achieved permanent turbo.

“We called it Purbo. It didn’t catch on.”
You might have meant it as a joke
Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would get the joke if I posted a picture of a 486DX with the J20 jumper set. You have to be a greybeard to remember that.
A 486DX with the J20 jumper set! HAH!
I still do it bro
I still turn my computer like that most of the time.
mine was an actual heavy-ass switch. it felt like shutting down the power of an entire neighborhood.
And a turbo button
Nine times out of ten I’d hit the turbo button and then spend half an hour wondering why the family computer was running slowly…
Hey now. Most of these people don’t know about turbo…
They certainly don’t know about the “magic/more magic” button…
I thought that was a switch?
Might have been. The way I heard it, the toggle was a button, like the turbo button.
When I was younger I had a computer where the front fell off and stripped the wires from the button.
To turn it on and off I had to hold the wires together, felt like I was hot wiring a car every time.
Perfect prelude to playing GTA
Wasn’t this built so the front wouldn’t fall off?
Well, Its not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
Well how is it untypical?
We’ve towed it outside of the environment.
When I bench tested components at a PC shop, I’d use my smallest screwdriver to short the pins on the motherboard to start up the caseless computer.
Kinda the same here but one day I noticed it also worked by simply touching the case with one of the wires and that’s how I did it from here.
SW In ------/ ----- GND ---- Chassis | \ / 10Kohm \ / +5v
I remember Macintosh computers from circa 1990. Even then Apple loved to just remove buttons because they hate buttons. Because it was so perfectly intuitive to drag a disc icon over to the fucking trash can icon in order to eject the floppy disc, they didn’t have a physical eject button for the floppy drive. Helpfully, they instead put the power button right where a floppy drive eject button should have been. So I was constantly turning the computer off whenever I wanted to eject a disc.
They did put the power button on the keyboard though, which was pretty awesome
It’s also how we accidentally shut them down before saving our work
Now that’s my cat’s job. Never again will I buy a case with a top mounted power button.
I had to disconnect power button from mobo because my room mate’s cat would just shut it off, luckily I had a case whose side panel was very easy to open with a hinge, so I tied two cables near the latch and to turn it in, I’d turn the latch open the case, quickly short the cables and close the panel and latch.
Thanks for reminding me of that. Also I swear that cat knew what I did and kept trying to open the latch for a few months before giving up.

She knows the power she holds.
It’s still the 2000’s so I still do
ctl-alt-defeet
Mine had the power button too high, so I would accidentally turn it off with my knee











