A more-fair comparison for current devices would be mobile vs a laptop or pc coming out of sleep mode... but even then it's not fair unless the pc has an SSD ra

A more-fair comparison for current devices would be mobile vs a laptop or pc coming out of sleep mode... but even then it's not fair unless the pc has an SSD rather than a drive that has to spin up and seek. All of his 1970-1980's devices ran from ROM rather than media. A C64 computer could boot up to a Basic prompt very quickly, but to load a program took many minutes. Apples and Ataris were similar, unless the program was on a ROM pack. To compare that to todays computer you have to stop at the initial BIOS screen, because that's where the ROM loading stops and media loading starts. Modern devices are more powerful and more flexible partly because their functionality isn't burnt into a ROM anymore. Only the initial loader is ROM, and the rest is loaded from media. The one thing that would make this faster is if computers remembered their initial hardware and software state after bootup and could quickly verify if anything has changed since the last boot. That would avoid the time consuming initialization of hardware and software. Of course, the hardware would need to remember its state too, and that's probably the sticking point.