Computer turbo button

My old 486 had a turbo button.
Never turned it off, except if I accidently knocked against the PC case, casuing whatever game I was playing at the time to grind to a stop.
And it was right next to the reset button, it was a really bad design, since the reset was sticking out from the case, inviting you to accidently knock into it.
 
Oh for gods sake!

They were used to clock 386/486 processors back to a lower speed so you could run old software that was written for 8Mhz 8086s without it imploding. All it did was trip a circuit that ran a lower clock on the motherboard. The LED display was just a segment display wired up to the switch and a power feed. You could pull them out and rejumper them to whatever you liked, never knew what the clockspeed was.
 
My old 486 DX/33 used to have one. There was a particular adventure game my brother and I used to play (can't remember the name). One part of it was a "find the pea under the shells" gambing game. Every time we did it we'd hit the turbo button so the swapping of the shells was basically done in slow motion. Won every time. :D
 
Meridian said:
My understanding of the issue (and I'm old enough to have lived through when those machines were new) is that it was about compatibility of certain software. Default was Turbo on, but where older programs struggled you could turn the speed down by releasing the Turbo button.


M
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Yup

A lot of games etc didn't have speed limiters built in (they took up valuable CPU time on slower machines, even when of, and memory on all systems), so the turbo button made the machine run slower when pressed.

Anyone who tried running Wing Commander on an xt, a 386 and a 486 would be able to tell you how funky it got when everything was running at about 5-10x human speed :p (utilities like mo-slo were often bundled with compilations of older games to do the same sort of thing as the turbo button on systms that didn't have it).
 
Yeah I remember having one on my first PC, it was on by default but some games would run too fast so you had to slow it down. The case even had a pair of seven segment displays to show what speed it was running at, it also had a key switch for the keyboard lock.
 
it would be kool to have a turbo button again the oc's the cpu to a user set amount and sets the fans to a user set speed
id have it 2.6ghz for web browsing and fans at 75% and then turbo would be 3.2 ghz overclock and 100% all fans
 
i would probably initiate my space screen saver and scream "afterburners initiated" and then rock in my seat to give the affect of high g's as i travel through space at the speed of light, but that fantasy will be demolished when i fall off my seat and hit my head on the desk only to lay on the floor screaming
 
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