this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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It's still ironic to me that the turbo button's purpose was to limit the CPU speed.
You know, like you use a turbo on a car to limit it's performance.
Naming things is one of the two hard problems in computer science and the turbo button was the button you press if your computer is going too fast... it made sense from someone's point of view.
Turbo would allow the computer to run at its full performance. Turning Turbo off would limit performance.
Brands starting doing this in the 486 days to match customer expectation. In the 286 and 386 days it slowed the PC down to 8MHz. It was called turbo because it was 8088 Turbo mode, as the 8088 nominally operated at 4.7MHz.
Source: Those of around since the 8088 days viciously mocked the brands that did this on newsgroups because they were catering to newbs... or whatever we called them back then.
Greenhorns?
After they flipped the meaning. But even then, if the PC didn't have the button it would run at full speed.
Turning it off would limit the speed. So the purpose of the existence of the button was not to make the PC go faster, but rather to make it go slower if you turned it off.
It's kinda like as if the eco mode button in you car was labelled "turbo mode" with flipped meaning.