Listening to Your Computer

by kmoser

Recently I've undertaken the monumental task of using a dedicated film scanner to digitize several hundred rolls of film.

The job is monotonous: load in a strip of film, click the Scan button, wait about five minutes for it to be scanned, and repeat for the next strip.  At about six strips per roll, multiplied by about 600 rolls, this is practically a Sisyphean task.

The job involves a lot of waiting... and listening.

The scanner is fairly quiet, but it emits a variety of noises at different pitches: grinding, whining, whirring, rattling, chattering... depending on whether it's scanning, feeding film, focusing, etc.  I found myself becoming acutely aware of what noises were being emitted so that I could either attend to problems (strips that were ejected for not being properly scanned) or simply feed the beast its next strip of film.  (Unfortunately I have no bulk-loader.)

I don't need to watch the screen or even see the scanner physically.  Provided I can hear the noises being emitted, I can tell what is happening, even if I'm in a nearby room.

As long as I have owned and used computers, I have relied on listening to them to determine what was happening, and whether things were going as I had planned.

My first computer, a Commodore PET, made several distinct sounds.  Most computers back then would attach to a CRT, which emitted a high-pitched whine through its flyback transformer.  The tape drive motor emitted a very soft hum when loading or saving programs.

In a quiet room, if you listened carefully you could tell whether the program had finished loading or saving.  Since it sometimes took several minutes to load or save a program, this freed you from having to watch the screen the whole time.  Use your ears!

In those days, devices were loud!

Dot matrix print heads screeched across the paper while pin-fed paper chunked loudly through the roller.  No noise meant the printer had finished printing a job, while the sound of the print head screeching at the wrong pitch indicated the paper or ribbon had jammed.  (Devices from previous generations were even louder: have you ever been in a server room running big iron?  Just the sound of the A/C system is awesome, let alone the staccato sounds of line printers cranking through sheets of pin-fed paper like a machine gun.)

My next computer, a Commodore 64, had a 5-1/4" floppy drive, a monumental step up in data storage speed and capacity over the PET's tape drive.  This came with its own set of distinct sounds: first, the subtle yet satisfying noise of the servos moving the read/write head between tracks indicating data was being read and/or written!

Today we take it for granted that drives "Just Freakin' Work," but back then failure was, unfortunately, an option.

Media failure was the most common occurrence, but drive failure was known to happen as well.  Floppies were temperamental, and an errant scratch or bend might render the entire disk useless.  Failure was usually indicated by the sounds of the read/write head frantically seeking, often accompanied by the drive head literally banging against the edge of its physical track in an attempt to determine where the magnetic tracks of the disk were.

Such behavior was known to throw the heads out of alignment, and was at first annoying and eventually dreaded by all Commodore floppy disk drive owners.  Copy-protection schemes, which relied on writing data with errors on purpose to thwart software piracy, only contributed to the problem (and to drives emitting loud noises).

The Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive was an interesting device: it had its own microprocessor and was programmable so that two drives could be hooked up in series and programmed to copy data from one to the other without going through the computer's CPU.  Even more fun, the drive could be programmed to vibrate the heads at different frequencies, which meant a clever program could use the drive to play music.  There was a well-known program that would cause the drive to buzz at different frequencies to play The Beatles' When I'm Sixty Four (get it?).  Tremendous fun, but terribly damaging!

"Serious" computers like the IBM PC often had loud fans installed to keep the innards cool, and a smart programmer would always listen for the lack of fan noise, indicating either that power had been lost, or worse, the fan had burned out and it was only a matter of time before one of the components overheated and the computer fried.  To this day, I keep the side panel of my desktop computer open so I can actually see the fan spinning, since it's too quiet to hear above the other noises in my office.

Things began to get quieter in the late 1980s and early 1990s: hard drives became commonplace, and dot matrix printers gave way to laser printers.  But if you listened carefully, there were still many telltale signs of what was happening under the hoods of these increasingly compact devices.

Hard drives were becoming more and more reliable, but they were still plagued by occasional head crashes, which were often foreshadowed by the dreaded "click of death" which indicated drive failure was imminent!  A smart hacker was constantly attuned to the sounds emitted by their HDD, and was quick to make backups if anything sounded amiss.

Laser printers, while quieter than dot matrix printers, were more complicated beasts: various trays to hold paper, rollers, and guides to feed it; complex interfaces between the paper, corona wire, and toner cartridge; and the complexity of the toner cartridge itself.  This lent itself to a cacophony of sounds, any of which could indicate successful printing or a paper jam.

As computers and hard drives got smaller, things became quieter.  But because we were often typing on a laptop keyboard, which was essentially the computer itself, and the (small) internal hard drive was affixed firmly to the inner case, this meant that any sounds or vibrations made by the drive were not only noticeable audibly, but even tactilely!  Yes, if you paid attention, you could actually feel when the hard drive was working.  These computers often had a red LED on the surface labeled "HDD" to indicate "hard disk drive" activity, so technically you could easily see when the drive was at work.  But being able to hear and feel it was so much cooler!

This brings us to today's SSD drives, which you would think would be completely silent as they have no moving parts.  Think again!

I can hear a distinct "whispering" sound whenever there is disk drive activity on my computer.  For lack of a better description, it sounds like bugs running around inside my computer.

Google tells me this is due to the "piezoelectric effect" if you want to read more about it.  Given the lack of red "HDD" activity lights in today's laptops, it's even more important to hear when the drive is active so you can tell if things are working properly!  Doing a Windows update that seems to be taking forever and might have frozen?  Copying lots of files and wondering if it's still going?  Listen to the drive!

Although most devices are pretty well shielded these days, most emit some type of hum or even a vibration that you can detect if you listen closely.  I encourage you to get close... closer!... to every device you own, even if just for a minute, to see if you can detect some signs of life, a signal that lets you know the difference between success... the device is operating normally... or failure... something has gone wrong!

And now if you'll excuse me, I just heard the telltale whine of my scanner ejecting the strip of film it has finished with, so it's time for me to load another strip.

Thank goodness for old, loud tech!