Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

I Like the Noise of the Computer

Published on in Medium Archive
Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/1c0
⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed. When I wrote this post, I was only 18 years old!

and I will miss it

The noise when the computer starts up, the noisy hard drive, the ventilation that starts up, or the noise when you don’t have a keyboard connected at boot time (beep beep).

The technology is moving so fast. More and more memory. Instead of HDDs SSDs now. Faster processors. Much more RAM. Increasingly higher resolutions for monitors. I am still quite young, but I also notice how much quieter the new devices become. Do you even notice that they’re switched on?

In the old days, even when I was born, there were tube screens. Huge chunks that people have put on their desks. When they were turned on, they would make that kind of flicker sound. What do we have today? Screens that are almost as thin as a credit card. No more noise.

The floppy disk drive also made noises. Floppy disks, remember? These were those disks where only a little bit more than 1 MB fit on it. It was enough for some documents back then. Operating systems could also be installed over it. When they didn’t need 10 GB just for the download.

On the one hand, the reduction of the noise generated by the devices we use today has something good, because it bothers us less and reduces the noise level. On the other hand, we lose our sense of what great machines they are. What they are capable of and what they can do.

Well, there’s one thing left. A video with the fan noise.

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Jan-Lukas Else
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