Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!rutgers!psuvax1!gondor.cs.psu.edu!schwartz
From: schwartz@gondor.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computer noises (was Re: Cray architecture)
Message-ID: <3400@psuvax1.psu.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 88 06:35:52 GMT
References: <769@kaos.UUCP> <2516@umd5.umd.edu>
Sender: netnews@psuvax1.psu.edu
Reply-To: schwartz@gondor.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 26
Summary: who needs a radio?

In article <2516@umd5.umd.edu> davidc@umd5.umd.edu (David Conrad) writes:
> [lots of quotations]
>I read an article in some PC magazine (PC maybe) that described the correct
>frequencies to listen to your AT.  The article claimed that it was fairly
>easy to hear an infinite loop.
>
>As an aside, netwatch, as distributed by IBM as part of their TCP/IP on the
>PC software has a noise option ('N') which makes a noise whenever a packet 
>goes by.

That's the spirit!  But really, who needs special hardware to hear their
machine think?  If you sit quitely next to almost any computer, you can
hear the high pitched noises that the circuit boards make as the load
changes.  Sitting next to my father's PC clone I find it easy to tell
when it does some compute bound thing, like a bunch of floating point
math (no coprocessor, by the way...).  Or, sitting next to this Sun3,
when X windows (slowly) repaints the screen the noise from the cpu is
positively audible.

Does OSHA (sp?) know about this?  I mean, we should all be wearing
protective earmuffs. :-)


-- Scott Schwartz                       | Your array may be without head or     
        schwartz@gondor.cs.psu.edu      | tail, yet it will be proof against
                                        | defeat.  -- Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"