I ressurected a beige ~1990 "turbo" button as a Web Component

[Dan Q]

Back in the 1980s-1990, it wasn't uncommon for those big beige boxes we called computers to have (a) a "power" button (or switch!), (b) a "reset" button, and (c) a "turbo" button. The latter was actually used to slow down the computer for compatibility with old programs - especially games - that ran "too fast", because it was commonplace in the 80s to use the speed the computer executed instructions as a timing function rather than a real-time clock!

But by the mid-to-late 90s, when many people were getting online for the first time, the button seemed pointless and forums were full of people asking "what is this even for?".

I spent my Monday on a project to resurrect those old days:

Got a website that needs that 90s feel? Just add two lines of code and you get some "beige buttons" of your very own!

Code

<!-- load the script -->
<script type="module" src="//beige-buttons.danq.dev/script.js"></script>

<!-- put the component anywhere you like -->
<danq-beige-buttons />

The Turbo button turns on and off the turbo light (and doesn't seem to do anything else), just like the old days (although it does expose an event, so if you want to make your website run slower if a visitor turns it off, you can!).

The Reset button... well, just don't press the Reset button while you're using the computer, okay?

The whole thing is open source with no restrictions (not even credit), so if you want to modify it or learn from it you can. It's implemented as a Web Component, which are a cool way of defining your own HTML tags in JavaScript. Full documentation and a working demo's on its website.

Have a play; let me know what you think! (Both links below have interactive copies of it.)

• Beige Buttons project
• Blog post about it

[OkayRelax]

now this, is epic. so wait the turbo button made things slow down.. not speed up? so weird.

[Dan Q]

now this, is epic. so wait the turbo button made things slow down.. not speed up? so weird.

Yup. When the turbo button was on, which was the default on boot, your processor would run at full speed. When it was turned-off, your processor would run slower, usually at half speed. It literally made your computer slow down to press it.

E.g. if you have a 33MHz 386 processor from around 1987, the turbo button would probably slow it down to 16MHz. Which would be useful if, say, you wanted to play the (excellent - I play it to this day!) 1984 game Alley Cat. Alley Cat was designed to play on the IBM PC/AT, which had a 286 processor running at only 8MHz.

Because the game sent instructions to the processor as fast as the CPU could handle them and used that to control the speed of play (not the way games work now!), it ran a little fast (but not unplayable) at 16MHz, but it was just about impossible at 33MHz. You'd get zapped by the electric eels in the fishtank within seconds, or fail to whack-a-mole the mouse in the holey cheese... assuming you even managed to get up onto the dustbins and out of the alley before the 'roided-up bulldog came thundering through like a bullet train.

The turbo button was a hack to make older software continue to work on newer computers, until developers caught up with the then-new trend of using the system's RTC (Real Time Clock) to keep track of the speed of gameplay.

And now it's a hack for the Web, too.