I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.
When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.
My dad had a C64 that I’d play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.
Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.
Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.
Except they did instantly boot. I didn’t say anything about how long they took to load a program, and if you had a cartridge, it instantly loaded as well. Have you actually used these computers, or just remember slow tape drives? Not that modern ones are fast by any means either, they just move more data and are prohibitively expensive.
Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed. Care to explain what you can do with that? You could easily boot DOS within 40 seconds on a 486. Can’t do that on Windows at all these days and we are talking 30 years later.
Sure, let’s compare a single user, 16 bit, text only OS, with Windows.
Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed.
Again, apples and oranges.
I/O drivers were stored as part of the ROM in both Apple and Commodore. That’s your ancient equivalent to BIOS and kernel. But they loaded essentially nothing, and didn’t need to handle a myriad of different devices and interfaces. The whole thing took a few kilobytes of storage, and obviously, wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t very specifically supported.
A modern Linux kernel would also boot in a couple seconds if we were to strip every single driver from it but the handful needed to handle a monitor, an input device, storage, etc. The moment you plugged in a mouse, it wouldn’t work, and without an UI or even an interpreter, it would be useless. And I can assure you, it is way faster to load zsh in a modern computer, than any BASIC interpreter on an Apple II.
The person you replied to countered a broad generalization with an anecdote which probably matches the lived experience of most of us oldies who lived through the time. Your comment did not contribute to the conversation.
Once again, that’s a single video of one example of an old computer booting up. It’s hardly irrefutable, like anything anecdotal. I’m not even disagreeing on the consensus of newer computers being undeniably faster, this is just a flimsy evidence regardless.
And frankly I don’t care about “contributing” as you describe it. That just amounts to adhering to everyone’s idea of contribution on social media, and I’m not Sisyphus, so…
That’s nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.
I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.
When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.
My dad had a C64 that I’d play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.
Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.
You realize most computers in the 80’s instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I’m sorry, are you fairly young?
Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.
So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.
Except they did instantly boot. I didn’t say anything about how long they took to load a program, and if you had a cartridge, it instantly loaded as well. Have you actually used these computers, or just remember slow tape drives? Not that modern ones are fast by any means either, they just move more data and are prohibitively expensive.
It’s easy to “boot up instantly” when not even the OS is loaded.
Modern BIOS load also instantly. Care to explain what you can do with that?
Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed. Care to explain what you can do with that? You could easily boot DOS within 40 seconds on a 486. Can’t do that on Windows at all these days and we are talking 30 years later.
Sure, let’s compare a single user, 16 bit, text only OS, with Windows.
Again, apples and oranges.
I/O drivers were stored as part of the ROM in both Apple and Commodore. That’s your ancient equivalent to BIOS and kernel. But they loaded essentially nothing, and didn’t need to handle a myriad of different devices and interfaces. The whole thing took a few kilobytes of storage, and obviously, wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t very specifically supported.
A modern Linux kernel would also boot in a couple seconds if we were to strip every single driver from it but the handful needed to handle a monitor, an input device, storage, etc. The moment you plugged in a mouse, it wouldn’t work, and without an UI or even an interpreter, it would be useless. And I can assure you, it is way faster to load zsh in a modern computer, than any BASIC interpreter on an Apple II.
Anecdotes ≠ proof
Here is a 486 taking over three minutes to boot.
The person you replied to countered a broad generalization with an anecdote which probably matches the lived experience of most of us oldies who lived through the time. Your comment did not contribute to the conversation.
Cool. My phone takes four.
well now see, if it had a math coprocessor… blah blah haha
Once again, that’s a single video of one example of an old computer booting up. It’s hardly irrefutable, like anything anecdotal. I’m not even disagreeing on the consensus of newer computers being undeniably faster, this is just a flimsy evidence regardless.
And frankly I don’t care about “contributing” as you describe it. That just amounts to adhering to everyone’s idea of contribution on social media, and I’m not Sisyphus, so…