You may not have noticed if you’re a little younger, but computers these days are just so quiet—not that I really have a complaint about that. Silent computers are better for concentration or to enjoy your media better, but not too long ago a typical home computer sounded like a mainframe from an old movie.
These days, your two main sources of noise are fans and maybe some coil whine. Some computers (like the later MacBook Airs) don’t even have fans, so they make no noises of any kind! That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling a little nostalgic for some of the noises my PC used to make.
6
The Dial-Up Modem Screech
We got the internet at home in 1999, just before I started high school. No Wi-Fi, no LAN, and just one computer in the house with an internet connection. Which meant that I had to move any file downloads to my own computer using floppy disks, and later my first ever flash drive at a whopping 64MB in size.
Eventually, I would scrape together some pocket money, and buy a modem for my own computer, so that I could connect directly to the internet. Of course, since connecting to the next would block phone calls, and was billed by the minute, I’d have to get permission to connect. This turned the whole process of connecting to the net into a ritual, which included that modem noise as it dialed the ISP’s server and performed a handshake.
This also meant it was impossible for anyone to get on the net without announcing it to the whole world. Well, there is a way to mute the modem speaker, but at the time I didn’t know about it!
5
Hard Drive Grinding and Clicking
Our first computer was an 80826 IBM-compatible with (I think) 4MB of RAM. Unlike the computer you have today, there was no simple way to know if your computer had frozen, or if it was just “thinking”. After all, this was a DOS computer that ran one program at a time. The 40MB hard drive in this computer also doubled as a way to know if the computer was still working and you just had to wait a bit.
I’ve actually diagnosed computer problems using nothing by my ears, and I’m not just talking about the “click of death”. I was literally able to tell there was something wrong with the startup sequence on my aunt’s home PC just by the noise the drive was making compared to the last time I visited, and yes, it was an autoexec.bat file filled with corrupted junk.
4
Floppy Disk Whirring and Chunking
The internal hard drive isn’t the only storage device that likes to make a good bit of noise. Floppy drives, with their servos and motors have a very distinct “chunk-chunk” sound when in operation. The first computers I ever used at school didn’t even have hard drives. Just two 5.25-inch floppy drives. One for the operating system and one for the software you wanted to run.
The sound a floppy drive made when you first powered the computer on and it basically ran a self-test is iconic, but maybe the coolest thing to happen to floppy drives since they’ve (almost) become obsolete, is the repurposing of these drives to make music.
3
The POST Beep
The POST (Power-On Self-Test) beep goes right along with that floppy drive startup noise. For the first half of my life as a computer user, the sound a computer made when you turned it on was this sequence.
I always waited with bated breath for that beep, because it was the sign that everything was OK. Well, at least everything before your operating system loaded. If you didn’t switch your computer off right the last time, there was a non-zero chance that your hard drive was corrupted—something I’m not nostalgic for!
2
CD/DVD Drive Spinning Up
If floppy drive noises remind me of the computer sounds of the past, optical discs still sound like the future to me. Which is ironic given that optical media are dying, and your computer probably doesn’t have an optical drive, though you really should still keep one around.
How can it not? Remember my first encounter with computer media was tape cassettes and floppy disks. Shiny optical discs that worked with lasers is space technology by comparison. I distinctly remember the first CD-ROM drive we got for our Pentium 166MMX computer (built into that old 80286 chassis) and how it opened a world for me. We got it along with a sound card, so suddenly I was watching videos on a computer! I played games like The Journeyman Project and I had a copy of Microsoft Encarta ’97 about three years before I would experience the internet.
The funny thing is that I still use optical drives with my game consoles all the time, but these don’t sound like the high-speed drives we had on computers pretty early on. There’s nothing quite like a 56x drive spinning up to full speed to make you feel like a computer wizard.
1
CRT Monitor Pops and Whines
This is another one that I technically don’t have to miss anymore because I’ve recently purchased several CRT monitors in pursuit of a specific retro gaming experience.
But for almost exactly 20 years I had not heard that “chunk” noise as the computer monitor turned itself on, degaussed itself, and then made the hair on my neck stand up.
So how was it to hear a CRT monitor power on after not hearing it for 20 years? Fantastic.