Most of us who had a PC between the 1980s and early 1990s know very well what the turbo button was, a very strange feature that did the opposite of what we could imagine, because it did not speed up the computer and make it offer higher performance but This made it run slower.

The turbo button was located on the outside of the computer, near the area where the computer’s power and reset buttons were located. In most cases we could also see screen with numbers near this button which They indicated the speed in MHz at which the processor worked.

When we activated the turbo, the processor speed did not increase, but on the contrary it dropped very much, until the difference in performance could be enormous. This reduction in processor operating speed had the specific goal of offering a Improved compatibility with older apps, games and programs that ran too fast on current processors.

Activating turbo mode and reducing the processor frequency caused the loss of performance that caused these older programs function normallyand were also less likely to suffer from spontaneous closure and blockage.

Why was the turbo button necessary?

When software that was considered legacy at the time was programmed by the developers used the processor to measure time. This means that things as important as character patterns in games, their movements, and any action measured in seconds have been calculated with the processor’s working speed as a reference.

For example, if a gun in an action game fired once every two seconds, it would calculate the number of shots over time based on the CPU frequency. If the game was developed to run on a 20 MHz processor, it was capable of completing 20 million cycles per second, meaning that the game knew it had to wait 40 million cycles to complete before reaching two seconds and deflecting the gun shot.

Now think about what happened when processors went over 100 MHz. The same game would have a serious problem because a 100 MHz CPU would complete 100 million cycles in one second, meaning that in one second the weapon would be destroyed. three times, and therefore that game would run almost three times faster. This was reflected in all events in games dependent on such timing, and I can confirm that some classics were absurdly fast on my 133 MHz Pentium.

The turbo button lowered the processor frequency specific speed and slowed down, which improved compatibility with older games and programs that measured time based on CPU cycles per second. Some games ran faster than normal but became playable.

Over the years, this button has disappeared for a variety of reasons, although there are undoubtedly two main reasons development and compatibility improvements, something where Windows and its commitment to supporting legacy applications was a major turning point, and also because of processor capacity. Adjust your work frequency automatically dynamic.