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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

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gherkinnn

You're behind the times, turbo has drifted (heh) far in to meaning 'fast' of sorts:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

- https://www.specialized.com/il/en/turbo-levo-4-pro/p/4218703...

- https://turbo.hotwired.dev (Drifts right back to turbo charger, but using one as the logo)

Or it can be used to amplify as in "Turbo Clippy":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42865194

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Don’t forget the turbo button, which is almost as old as turbo pascal.

I’m curious did anyone here have a turbo button that actually did speed up performance? My 386SX had a turbo button but all it did was turn on a light.

It varied but the older ones definitely had a visible impact if you had something CPU bound running. There was an old helicopter-themed game my dad had which would start running impossibly fast because everything was based on cycle counts rather than actual time.

I was disappointed to discover that the screen scrolling in Warcraft III was too fast to make large maps usable. I was so excited to find that game used and I couldn’t play it in the early 00’s.

For most of us it was a misnomer because it was a lag button not a turbo button. It defaulted to on. If you turned it off it would make the machine slower, allowing certain programs to run properly instead of too fast for humans.

But we all have stories of a friend whose machine was slow because they hit the button not understanding what it does. For them it did become the turbo button.

It slowed down the clock to 4.77 MHz on my 486DX2-66.

My 286 went from 8 MHz to 12 MHz when I hit that turbo button. And yeah that was instantly noticeable.

Kept it on except for one ninja game which was unplayable on turbo, using fixed cycle count as delay mechanism. So all enemies and movements were crazy fast on turbo.

I prefer the real Borland Pascal, thank you very much.

(The turbo button slowed the clock rate down for old games and some ISA cards that didn't like faster clock rates.)

25Mhz to 33MHz. Oh yeaaaaaaa!

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