5 ms·

When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. It was the same for the Acorn Archimedes in the UK. These computers had the e

When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. It was the same for the Acorn Archimedes in the UK. These computers had the entire GUI OS burnt into the ROM. After that I remember the shock or getting a 386 and waiting minutes for Windows 95 to load. It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry.

unnouinceput 7y ago
386 and W95? Not a good combination. By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. As for loading times it all boiled down on how many check-up you wanted or not in your BIOS. As a rule I've always did memory check by BIOS only one time when buying/putting together a new PC and after that I've check it off in BIOS, halving the time it need it to boot. It was perfectly easy to have a 3 seconds BIOS time, sometime was even a nuisance to make it that short because you'd had to be fast to press Del (or whatever the BIOS key was) if you wanted to go to BIOS instead.
- dmead 7y ago
  you're conflating a bunch of stuff here.
- avian 7y ago
  > By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. Maybe the 486 was the low end of what you could buy at the time, but not everyone bought a new computer. My parents upgraded their 386 from Windows 3.1 to 95. It was slow, but usable.
  - unnouinceput 7y ago
    In 3rd year at Uni, in good old '96 I had a P5 with W95 in my dorm room. Granted, not mine, but the friend and colleague who had it was not some rich parents kid, just middle class. We played HOMM2 on it all day long, much to his gf dismay.
- vardump 7y ago
  I remember 100 MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM being the point when Win95 was nice to use. With 8 MB it would just swap too much. Of course it'd run with much less.
- karmakaze 7y ago
  There was a long time where the 486 was the sweet spot before Pentiums were commonplace. I didn't so much run Win3x/9x but did have both OS/2 and WinNT i486 (desktop and laptop) machines with up to 66 MHz 40 MB ram before moving off them.
  - unnouinceput 7y ago
    486 DX4 at 100MHz was something like 250 USD in 1995. I remember this perfectly because my sister in law saw this in a ad and wanted to buy it for her business and need it my help for negotiating the price down to 200 USD, since that was all the budget she had for such a purchase.
Razengan 7y ago
> It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry. That is exactly how I feel about many other regressions in tech! Including the promises of the internet and online gaming, or when the industry wanted to sell 3D cards but 3D games were uglier than 2D/hand-drawn games for several years..
- chubot 7y ago
  Interoperable instant messenging too... and generally being able to move data from one application to another.
weinzierl 7y ago
Almost the the same for me. I had a C64 and you could switch it off and immediately on again. There was no boot time but if you did it too quickly it sometimes behaved strangely. That was because there were bits and pieces of the previous RAM contents still there. The most obvious effect was remnants of the old application on the screen. So no boot time but still had to wait 3 seconds. When I got my 386DX(ha!) I thought the boot process was so much of a hassle that I seriously believed it would just be a matter of months until that problem got fixed and newer computers would be instant on again. Oh boy was I wrong.
Theodores 7y ago
The whole of MS-DOS was rubbish if you came from an Acorn machine, even the BBC Model B was streets ahead in terms of usable performance. Games were definitely better. I have a revisionist view of Microsoft - I no longer believe their early products of BASIC and MS-DOS were enabling. And Windows got the world stuck in the desktop PC paradigm when mainstream computing was networked, not moving floppy disks around. Nowadays with Ubuntu and a decent disk I don't have boot speed problems. If I want the machine rebooted then it is all up and loaded where I last left off within a minute. That includes the shutdown with web server, proxy server and networked drives to deal with. So I am asking, does everyone else have a huge boot delay? Is it really something like three minutes on Windows or Apple to shutdown and restart the machine? Since I disabled IPV6 I don't even need to reboot - it used to start up funny after a suspend, which it does not do now, the network actually works so no reboots needed. The other performance difference is concerning adblockers. Recently I turned off the adblocker for a website with a form I needed to fill in. Suddenly the fans were on and my machine was crawling along! Today with free and open source software you can have a modest machine that goes at speed or you can have a paid for operating system and not turn off the adverts to have an experience akin to wading through a lake of treacle. The developer tools seem fine in open source world so I am wondering if going with Windows really is the sane and rational choice for productivity. I can understand having a Windows machine for testing and doing Windows things but for actual work the open source world just has so much more 'professional' productivity. Boot speed being an indicator of this.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  > So I am asking, does everyone else have a huge boot delay? Is it really something like three minutes on Windows or Apple to shutdown and restart the machine? Since I only reboot for OS updates (at which point the update process also runs which is much slower), I had to test this out. My MacBook Pro running the latest MacOS, takes about 20 seconds to shut down, and then 50 seconds to boot again - including restoring the software that was running before shutdown [browser w/ tabs, IRC client, etc] since it does that before hiding the boot progress screen.
dkersten 7y ago
> When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. I have a cheap laptop (it does have an SSD) that boots from pushing power to a minimal but perfectly usable i3 window manager system in a second.

unnouinceput 7y ago

386 and W95? Not a good combination. By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. As for loading times it all boiled down on how many check-up you wanted or not in your BIOS. As a rule I've always did memory check by BIOS only one time when buying/putting together a new PC and after that I've check it off in BIOS, halving the time it need it to boot. It was perfectly easy to have a 3 seconds BIOS time, sometime was even a nuisance to make it that short because you'd had to be fast to press Del (or whatever the BIOS key was) if you wanted to go to BIOS instead.

dmead 7y ago
you're conflating a bunch of stuff here.
avian 7y ago
> By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. Maybe the 486 was the low end of what you could buy at the time, but not everyone bought a new computer. My parents upgraded their 386 from Windows 3.1 to 95. It was slow, but usable.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  In 3rd year at Uni, in good old '96 I had a P5 with W95 in my dorm room. Granted, not mine, but the friend and colleague who had it was not some rich parents kid, just middle class. We played HOMM2 on it all day long, much to his gf dismay.
vardump 7y ago
I remember 100 MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM being the point when Win95 was nice to use. With 8 MB it would just swap too much. Of course it'd run with much less.
karmakaze 7y ago
There was a long time where the 486 was the sweet spot before Pentiums were commonplace. I didn't so much run Win3x/9x but did have both OS/2 and WinNT i486 (desktop and laptop) machines with up to 66 MHz 40 MB ram before moving off them.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  486 DX4 at 100MHz was something like 250 USD in 1995. I remember this perfectly because my sister in law saw this in a ad and wanted to buy it for her business and need it my help for negotiating the price down to 200 USD, since that was all the budget she had for such a purchase.

Razengan 7y ago

> It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry. That is exactly how I feel about many other regressions in tech! Including the promises of the internet and online gaming, or when the industry wanted to sell 3D cards but 3D games were uglier than 2D/hand-drawn games for several years..

chubot 7y ago
Interoperable instant messenging too... and generally being able to move data from one application to another.

weinzierl 7y ago

Almost the the same for me. I had a C64 and you could switch it off and immediately on again. There was no boot time but if you did it too quickly it sometimes behaved strangely. That was because there were bits and pieces of the previous RAM contents still there. The most obvious effect was remnants of the old application on the screen. So no boot time but still had to wait 3 seconds. When I got my 386DX(ha!) I thought the boot process was so much of a hassle that I seriously believed it would just be a matter of months until that problem got fixed and newer computers would be instant on again. Oh boy was I wrong.

Theodores 7y ago

The whole of MS-DOS was rubbish if you came from an Acorn machine, even the BBC Model B was streets ahead in terms of usable performance. Games were definitely better. I have a revisionist view of Microsoft - I no longer believe their early products of BASIC and MS-DOS were enabling. And Windows got the world stuck in the desktop PC paradigm when mainstream computing was networked, not moving floppy disks around. Nowadays with Ubuntu and a decent disk I don't have boot speed problems. If I want the machine rebooted then it is all up and loaded where I last left off within a minute. That includes the shutdown with web server, proxy server and networked drives to deal with. So I am asking, does everyone else have a huge boot delay? Is it really something like three minutes on Windows or Apple to shutdown and restart the machine? Since I disabled IPV6 I don't even need to reboot - it used to start up funny after a suspend, which it does not do now, the network actually works so no reboots needed. The other performance difference is concerning adblockers. Recently I turned off the adblocker for a website with a form I needed to fill in. Suddenly the fans were on and my machine was crawling along! Today with free and open source software you can have a modest machine that goes at speed or you can have a paid for operating system and not turn off the adverts to have an experience akin to wading through a lake of treacle. The developer tools seem fine in open source world so I am wondering if going with Windows really is the sane and rational choice for productivity. I can understand having a Windows machine for testing and doing Windows things but for actual work the open source world just has so much more 'professional' productivity. Boot speed being an indicator of this.

kalleboo 7y ago
> So I am asking, does everyone else have a huge boot delay? Is it really something like three minutes on Windows or Apple to shutdown and restart the machine? Since I only reboot for OS updates (at which point the update process also runs which is much slower), I had to test this out. My MacBook Pro running the latest MacOS, takes about 20 seconds to shut down, and then 50 seconds to boot again - including restoring the software that was running before shutdown [browser w/ tabs, IRC client, etc] since it does that before hiding the boot progress screen.

dkersten 7y ago

> When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. I have a cheap laptop (it does have an SSD) that boots from pushing power to a minimal but perfectly usable i3 window manager system in a second.