When I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.
And it dates back from 1988 for me. I’d always rely on the nice scratching sound of the HDD and the LED to know whether my computer had crashed or was just loading. There was no need for a spinning wheel when you could hear the data getting loaded ;)
I could tell what boot phase my 386 + 486 desktops were at by listening to the ticking of the HDD heads. When I installed Win95 on the 486 (the poor thing), the time until the o/s was finished with the drive quadrupled.
