alt Hacker News> The name ‘Turbo’ was associated with what were regarded as hobbyist products
"Turbo" was also a short-lived pop-slang term roughly meaning "cool" or "awesome." I never heard it used much but a lot of products in that era had "turbo" in the name.
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bombarolo • today at 6:01 PM
There was that “Turbo” button on my (self-made) 386sx, that magically doubled the CPU clock. This is what “turbo” meant in the 90s, weird.
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andsoitis • today at 8:45 PM
Turbo Boost. Intel still talks about it on their website: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/tur...
The intensifier meaning of "turbo", connoting something powerful and fast, is also interesting. Its original uses are in engineering, simply denoting something that has a turbine in it. Thus turbopump, turbojet, and turbocharger, the last of which probably being the primary driver of the semantic shift.
The Latin root of "turbo" and "turbine" is turbo, meaning a whirlwind, a spinning top, or more generally any spinning motion as a noun, and "agitate, disturb" as a verb. The latter word is, of course, derived from turbo as well, as are "perturb", "turbulence", "turbid", and even "trouble"!