8 Commands and Buttons You've Probably Never Used Again

All this progress made the programs ran much faster, but this created a problem: Games were mostly optimized to use all the available CPU. There were no delay loops, no tight control of the execution time of each function. When your processor is extremely limited, it doesn’t make sense to spend processing checking if it’s running too fast.

It’s like the decision between European automakers that limits the speed of most passenger cars to 250 km/h. This subroutine is in Audis and BMWs, but I highly doubt you’ll find this code in the Control Unit of a G-Wiz.

The solution ended up coming through hardware . Motherboard manufacturers created a button that, when pressed, reduced the clock speed to the 4.77 MHz of the original XT. Yes, the turbo button made your PC slower.

Obviously, even at 4.77 MHz a 386 or a 486 was much faster than a PC XT, the turbo button was becoming more and more useless, and your main use became to annoy people you didn’t like. With the entry of Pentiums on the market, the Turbo was discontinued for good, and if you wanted to play XT games, you were out of luck.

2 – Car Choke

This was the button , or rather, the most mysterious command of the car, in the time when cars had very few controls. The choke was ignored by a lot of people, except the people who had alcohol cars, which in winter was hell to get in the morning.

Then the choke was essential, but what does it do?

It changes the stoichiometry of the system. The name is complicated, but the concept is simple: Every chemical reaction has an ideal relationship between components, so the hydrogen tanks in the rockets are much bigger than the oxygen ones. For complete combustion, you need two atoms of Hydrogen for each one of Oxygen.

In the case of the aspirated internal combustion engine, there is an ideal stoichiometric ratio of air and fuel, but sometimes the ideal is not ideal. In cold temperatures the fuel is more difficult to pulverize, so less alcohol (or gasoline) is detonated by the spark from the spark plug.

Justin from Smarter Every Day made a video detailing how a carburetor works, it’s excellent.

The choke decreases airflow to the carburetor, which reduces atmospheric pressure. This causes more fuel to be atomized and thrown into the cylinder. This mixture rich in fuel and poor in air, contrary to what common sense suggests, is detonated more easily.

The carburetor makes the engine run with less thermal efficiency, generating more heat than normal, which is what we want. In a few minutes the engine as a whole reaches a decent operating temperature, and the carburetor can be turned off.

Button? Lever? Choke control on an old car. (Credit: SealyPhoto / Wikimedia Commons)

With the invention of injection electronics, the choke completely disappeared. Dozens of sensors inform the Control Unit of the fuel temperature, current and ideal stoichiometry, and several other parameters, making adjustments hundreds of times per second. Today, your car can run on alcohol, gasoline, a mixture of the two, Dreher and even sausage water, and it will start right away even in the worst winter.

3 – Rewind Button

The World it wasn’t extremely linear in the past. In the wax cylinders of early phonographs, you moved the needle to whatever position you wanted. During the entire era of LPs, all we had to do was lift the arm of the record player and we would choose the track we wanted, and even the music part, if you had a good eye and a steady hand.

Then came the 237479832 recording formats on tape and film (or 237479833 if the Techmoan dig up one more) and our life became linear. Skip to the next track on a K7 Tape? Press FF and wait. Want to hear the track at the end of the album? It’s gonna take a while.

On the VCR, same thing . To get to a point ahead you have to run the entire tape there, and in the end, are you done watching? Rewind.

The DVD solved that, right? No. The most granularity he offered was the chapters. Some devices allowed you to enter the lane with time and he would jump there but who knows about these things?

The way was to advance and retreat… linearly.

Now the best: Even today, in the age of streaming, we still use the same buttons, now virtual. The tape metaphor is still the same, we only get rid of it on services like YouTube. On TVs? All linear.

4 – Azimuth on k7 recorder

Only two groups know this: Nerds from the 80s/90s and audiophiles.

Before everyone used floppy disk, the K7 recorder was everyone’s preferred storage device. The tapes were cheap, everyone had a recorder at home, and there were no compatibility issues.

Except that the recordings deteriorated, and some were more sensitive than a schoolgirl from anime. The computer just couldn’t read the audio. One of the main culprits was Azimuth, who were much more than a cheesy band.

Basically, a K7 Tape was divided on two horizontal tracks, Side A and Side B. (4, if stereo) At any given time, the playback head only accesses one of these tracks, but as each recorder is different, sometimes the information was recorded out of position, or the recorder used in the reading was reading one of the tracks AND a little bit of the other.

The play button Azimuth was controlled by a screw in the read/write head, which changed its position. It was a delicate operation that required patience, fortunately it was in the past.

5 – Vertical and Horizontal in the TV

In the time of analog TV, there was no concept of pixel, video memory and other frills . It was all a matter of timing and voltages to indicate to the TV when information in an image field started and when it ended.

Between one image and another, there was something called a “synchronism bar”, which worked in conjunction with the TV signal encoding standard specific to each region. This pattern indicated, among other things, the “width” of the image, so the TV knew when to command the electron beam from the cathode ray tube to go down a line and return to the corner of the image.

These alignments were very accurate , and sometimes signal interference or component tolerances caused them to deviate from standards. The image would then begin to roll up, or to the side. Sometimes both.

These effects were brilliantly used in the opening of the 1963 series The Outer Limits, with the famous phrase “We controlled the vertical. We controlled the horizontal.”

Actually, you were in charge, every TV had adjustment potentiometers on the back. One fine day, TVs became more sophisticated, integrated circuits began to manage these adjustments, and the vertical and horizontal buttons disappeared. Just don’t ask me when it happened.

6 – The terrifying movie compartment button

The first Kodak camera was an expensive toy. It cost $25.00 in 1888, equivalent to $731.44 in 2021, but it was a genius strategy. With the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest”, she came up with a film of 100 poses. You took pictures freely. When the film was finished, I sent the camera to Kodak, which for US$10.00 (US$292.58 in 2021 values) developed the photos, mounted it in an album, recharged the camera and sent it back.

After that, portable cameras became cheaper, but film was still expensive and fragile. In moments of extravagance, we bought rolls of 36 poses, and thought 5 times before using each one.

All the time, a constant fear: Pressing unintentionally the button to open the film compartment. If that happened, game over. All photos would be exposed to light, lost forever.

One day Kodak invented roll film, you were photographing, the film was rolled up on a spool and the rewound end. If it caught, the way was to open the camera in the dark or under a blanket, and try to rewind it by hand.

Then someone had a great idea: Now the entire movie was wound on the reel, as the photos were taken, it was rewound inside the protective case of the roll, so the photos already taken would be protected.

I still have nightmares about it. (Credit: Internet Reproduction)

Thanks to that the only fear was accidentally opening the camera and losing the unused film.

This all became meaningless with the advent of digital cameras, which reigned for a fleeting moment before being decimated by cell phones.

7 – Reset everything

Your PC sure has a reset button, but have you noticed that your laptop doesn’t?

In the past, resetting the computer was essential, a much milder way to restart the machine, rather than something more brutal like turning off the power button

power. Yes, computers crashed all the time. At the height of Blue Screens any Windows user faced a few crashes a day. The reset button was used directly.

And not just on PCs. My Palm Pilot had a reset button, accessible through a small hole. Most phones didn’t have it, just take the battery out. Any more sophisticated electronic equipment came with a reset.

You can search, under everything that is old, there is a reset button. (Credit: Carlos Cardoso / MeioBit)

Today everyone learned to manage abnormal situations much more gracefully, even when there is already an explicit button combination to invoke a reset, it is still something done via software, not hardware.

Other devices, not even that. My Mi Band assumes that its software is robust enough that it never needs to be restarted remotely. Is it a bold proposal? For sure, but at least one of my gadgets has the courage to live in the future.

8 – Channel Selector

There was a time when your TV had the ability to tune in to more channels than ever before. broadcasting stations. In big cities we had 5 or 6 VHF channels. In the early days, one or two, so a TV with the ability to tune in 13 channels was more than enough, like the 640KB that Bill Gates never said was plenty.

The TVs in turn (did you notice that this text is full of alliteration?) came with a rotating channel selector that was a source of frustration for any child. First, it was one of several technological devices that parents had no knowledge of, but exercised their arrogance by making up rules.

Just like “video games ruin television” , turning the selector backwards would ruin the equipment, so if you were on Channel 6 and wanted to go to 4, you couldn’t turn two backwards, you had to run the whole damn thing. 7, 8, 9…

tlectlectlectlectlectlectclle… (Credit: Housing Works Thrift Shops / Wikimedia Commons)

Note: The first notion that the world was much bigger than that we imagined was noticed when we took a trip out of the city, or the state, and discovered that the TV channels had different numbers, and regional programming.

The channel selector was especially hated as a source of child labor. No one had a child for noble reasons, children were raised exclusively to get off the couch under paternal orders, and change the channel. Sometimes we weren’t even in the living room, they called us, and we had to spin the devil’s wheel.

One day, visiting rich family friends, I discovered a TV with a huge box, with four buttons: channel forward, backward (I felt vindicated) and volume. It was an ultrasound remote control, a technological marvel.

Four buttons and manage to make a confusing interface. Sometimes I hate engineers. (Credit: Internet Playback)

Some manufacturers have tried wired controls, which didn’t work out very well, but with the advent of ultrasonic and then infrared, children had their freedom, and the design of TVs changed radically. Today no TV has a front panel, most people ignore it until, somewhere on their TV there are physical buttons, resisting bravely and serving as a backup for when you inevitably lose the remote control in that black hole that lives between the sofa cushions. .

There, you will have two options: Use the App of your Smart TV, or produce a child to serve as a remote control. Installing the app is usually faster.

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