[vcf-midatlantic] The sounds of computing media

[Neil Cherry]

Oh this brings back good memories. :-)

The chook, chook, chook noise of an Apple floppy drive.
The steppers on many of the hard drives
The Atari disk drive noise my dog would imitate to get my attention (yes, really).
Modem pulse dialers
Modem sync noises (300, 1200, 2400, 9600 and the almost 56K)
Teletype news printers (and Okidata 80 and 92 printers which we sold to the news bureaus)
19KHz whine (that still hurts my ears)

Back in the early 90's AT&T sold a 6386/25 (Intel motherboard) that was blindly
fast at boot.  The BIOS message would fly by and you'd boot into the autoexec immediately.
I took advantage of that to create a autoexec that looked like it booted into the
C800:0000 ROM to format the hard drive. I then read the main directory and wrote it
to a file and then deleted it. This made the machine sound like it was formatting the
hard drive. The machine with this practical joke was done on one of my coworkers who
had just completed is Master Degree project, and it was due that week. Oh, I also made
the bat file so it would put the original bat file back. He came in, booted the machine,
nearly covered the keyboard in coffee and shutdown the power. His office mate let him
know it was a practical joke and his files weren't lost.

-- 
Linux Home Automation         Neil Cherry       ncherry at linuxha.com
http://www.linuxha.com/                         Main site
http://linuxha.blogspot.com/                    My HA Blog
Author of:    	Linux Smart Homes For Dummies