My Apple //c sits quietly on its desk, where it has been since I bought the desk earlier this year. Today I barely booted it up, before I shut it off again as I had to run off and do something else.
Some days are like that. Other days, it will be on all day, used for one thing after another. I’ll program a little, play a game for a while and then go back to programming.
Generally speaking the Apple //c is quieter than many modern computers with no fans, the only noise they make is the keyboard and the disk drives. If you format a disk, the drives can get quite loud.
Where they really rock is when they print.
That was not always the case. My first printer, was an Apple Scribe printer. It was a serial dot matrix printer, that was fairly quiet as it didn’t use impact to print, It used heat and a thermal ribbon to print.
My current printer, the ImageWriter II is an impact, dot matrix printer and you really want to wait for a commercial to print anything, as it can be fairly loud.
One thing about older technology that seems to slip through the cracks in history is the senses of the older machines. For those of us that have worked on the old mini computers, some of us remember the sounds they made or the heat they put out. Although that last one, usually meant the AC was out and we should be shutting down.
If you never heard an older computer or printer working, you should take a minute or two to go on youtube and watch one of the videos on older coputers and listen to how load they were. I’ll post links soon to some I think are relevant.
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