Now you have to get an enthusiast/sports car just to get oil pressure and voltage gauges, and even then they're likely to be nerfed to non-linearity so they're always in the same place until so far outside of normal that it's too late to prevent any negative consequences. The same thing happened to automobiles when they went mainstream. It's no surprise this has resulted in removal of things like status/activity lights. When personal computers became just another consumer electronics gadget, they ceased being tools optimized for their prior primary use cases. I'm equally somewhat reminded of the Star Trek TNG Episode - Relics when Scotty is in the holodeck simulating his Enterprise and tells Picard how he knew the Enterprise, his Enterprise and how fast it was going and the health of the engines by the feel and vibrations in the deck plate and none of that in the future he is on Picard's Enterprise. That's nostalgia, which is always a good positive comfort go to place as you get older. Until, you're telling tales of whirring media and 5MB hard drives the size of a washing machine and costing more than a house at the time. Though in the early days, such feedback was the best AV you had.īut as life moves on, and you get older, you start to appreciate the times as a child when your grandparents would reminisce the same things, and you would think old folks crazy as your baseline of life and technology is still being set at a fast pace, that eventually slows down. Then things got faster and all those tactile feedbacks of knowing the health of your system got lost. You would know your computer so well from that extra feedback from disc lights, noise of the disc head moving, and just a microsecond change in the noise on startup had you in investigation mode. Like the times of early dialup modems you could tell what was going on by the sound of modem, then came cable as things got faster. Indications of activity can still be useful to me at times, but they're never comforting the way they used to be. Today our machines can be always silent while never being still, and they can spend at least as much time working for others as they do for us. I'd get up, fix the issue, and go back to sleep comforted by the sounds of my computer working away for me once more. For a time they were a wonderful source of white noise for sleeping and I would sometimes find myself waking up if a computer I'd tasked with something overnight suddenly fell silent because it encountered a problem. Personally, I've always preferred the soft whir of fans and the clicks of old hard drives. With countless people using our devices for their own benefit on their own schedules it's nowhere near as useful to know when your computer is doing "something" because it's always doing something. The maker of your OS sends themselves a steady stream of data about what you've been doing on your computer: which files you've had open recently, what software you have installed, etc. The company who makes your mouse driver might want to phone home, then silently download and install a bunch of software you never asked for. These days, any number of people feel entitled to use our computers whenever they like for whatever they like. When my computer started (or stopped) doing a bunch of things unexpectedly it was an indication of compromise or of an application gone rogue. Disk activity indicators, the ramping up of fan speeds, or the flashing of network activity lights used to tell me when my computer was doing something I wanted it to do.
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