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Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Noisy Gear of Yesteryear

Thanks to Kevin for linkage to this great article on Wired:
A Geek Yearns for Yesteryear's Noisy Gear
In particular, I miss the warm, grumpy sounds of the floppy drive. I remember sneaking into my grandparents' computer room -- that's right, my grandfather got me into computers; he is an awesome man -- at 6 in the morning, unable to wait until everyone's awake for another round of greenish videogaming. I extract a floppy, an actual floppy that flops, from the treasure-trove of pirated games and slide one into the drive. I switch it on and I'm greeted with a startled beep and a clatter from the hard drive, followed by a series of mechanical grunts as the machine wearily rummages for data.
[...]
Better yet, when something went wrong you could hear it. Hell, you could practically feel it. The drive would respond to a corrupt disk with a scraping shudder that resonated in your spinal column. You didn't get a dialog box with an exclamation point and a polite boop, you got a death rattle.

Looking back, I really do miss the audible feedback you used to get from computing. Floppy drives grinding, buckling-spring keyboard clacking, the thrumm! of a monitor degaussing. It was obvious when your dial-up connection worked and equally obvious when it failed.

Edit: Fixed link to article.

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