Comment by SoftTalker
1 day ago
> The name ‘Turbo’ was associated with what were regarded as hobbyist products
"Turbo" was also a short-lived pop-slang term roughly meaning "cool" or "awesome." I never heard it used much but a lot of products in that era had "turbo" in the name.
The intensifier meaning of "turbo", connoting something powerful and fast, is also interesting. Its original uses are in engineering, simply denoting something that has a turbine in it. Thus turbopump, turbojet, and turbocharger, the last of which probably being the primary driver of the semantic shift.
The Latin root of "turbo" and "turbine" is turbo, meaning a whirlwind, a spinning top, or more generally any spinning motion as a noun, and "agitate, disturb" as a verb. The latter word is, of course, derived from turbo as well, as are "perturb", "turbulence", "turbid", and even "trouble"!
There was that “Turbo” button on my (self-made) 386sx, that magically doubled the CPU clock. This is what “turbo” meant in the 90s, weird.
Yeah a lot of them had that turbo button. I always thought it was kind of a Spinal Tap thing.
"Why don't you just run it at the faster speed all the time, and make that the regular speed?"
"Ours have turbo"
For those who don't remember, the turbo button existed as a backwards compatibility hack. A lot of games in the early days did dumb stuff like implement game timing loops by spinning the CPU, because devs just didn't think ahead to "what if people play my game on hardware that doesn't exist yet". So when the first big leaps in clock speed came out, some games ran unplayably fast. The fix was a literal button on the front of the machine that controlled the clock speed.
Devs learned how to use the timer chips pretty fast after that though, so for a long time the turbo button existed but appeared to be useless. Pushing it would toggle a light but nothing appeared to change.
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Turbo Boost. Intel still talks about it on their website: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/tur...