3 ms·
The day I sold my Atari ST, I pulled it out of the stack of old computers, connected it to a monitor, hooked up a disk drive and turned it on. Poof: Desktop wi
by kabdib 9y ago
The day I sold my Atari ST, I pulled it out of the stack of old computers, connected it to a monitor, hooked up a disk drive and turned it on.
Poof: Desktop with a working mouse cursor in under one second.
I booted a nearby PC, and then hit reset until it booted. In the time that the "hot shit" 386 box took to get to a DOS prompt, the ST booted about fifty times. To something with graphics.
Modern system boot times depress me. We have database servers that take 15 minutes to POST. Doing updates or diagnosing hardware-level issues with these things is g l a c i a l l y slow. I work with message queueing systems that are not shy about several seconds of latency -- what are these stupid things doing? The datacenter they're running in is less than a hundred microseconds wide, and everything is high-end XEON CPUs with SSD and more cache than the first 30 computers I used, put together.
Sigh.
- bitwize 9y agoEverything is faster when you build it into ROM. The cost is flexibility. Should you wish to run another OS on that ST, ypu would have to bootstrap it through TOS.
- kayamon 9y agoOn a modern system, you could use flash RAM to get the same speed with all the flexibility advantages.
- bitwize 9y agoIndeed and unlike the 90s, SSDs are cheap now. :)
- kabdib 9y agoI've since built systems based on flash that boot in tenths of a second, with over a thousand times the memory of that ST. I'll point out that the PC BIOS the ST was competing with was also in ROM, and only spent the last couple seconds of its execution loading stuff from disk -- I think the test was more than fair.