I remember. The turbo on my 386 didn’t make it faster. It made non turbo mode slower.
Comment on Finally a useful feature (no)
reddwarf@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Turbo… It’s that damn “turbo” again but now AI
In the eighties “turbo” was all the rage and I kid you not, everything had the label “turbo” on it. Hold on to your hats boys and girls who were not alive in the eighties, it’s gonna be wild…
evatronic@lemm.ee 4 months ago
And009@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
Totally makes sense, the non-turbo was always an eco-mode
DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Some games/software expected/relied on a certain CPU speed to run correctly. If your computer was faster than that, the software would run too fast. The turbo button let you toggle between the maximum speed your computer could go, and the speed that the software needed/expected in order to run normally.
Basically, there was an actual reason for the turbo button, it wasn’t just marketing on computers.
blindsight@beehaw.org 4 months ago
Indeed. As a silly example, I had a Pacman clone game that ran based on CPU cycle speed. I needed to turn the in-game speed setting way down and toggle turbo off to make it slow enough to be playable.
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
note: on most computers, it worked the opposite to how one would think. Turning it on slowed your cpu to around 33 MHz