15 ms·

I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for

by dayvid 7y ago

I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was. Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast.

soulofmischief 7y ago
> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/
- GekkePrutser 7y ago
  Not really :) Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed. However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.
  - jws 7y ago
    Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud… The VMS manuals suggested that system administrators may want to keep the hard wired terminals down to 2400 buad and hide the fact from users by turning on "smooth scroll" (which only scrolled about that fast anyway) in order to keep the interrupt load down on the Vax. Something about batching of interrupts on the multiport serial cards.
    - GekkePrutser 7y ago
      Yes there was that but it also just couldn't handle the full speed continuously. It depended a lot what kind of commands were sent. Full text was fairly OK but drawing commands took a while as far as I remember. In any case, flow control was a must-have in those days. Either CTS/RTS or at least XON/XOFF
  - ralusek 7y ago
    There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age...when spinners are almost exclusively used in web apps in order to denote that the web browser is yet to receive the necessary data over YOUR internet connection.
    - kokx 7y ago
      Tell that to my former boss. They wanted me to delay sending responses from the backend, because they liked showing off their custom spinner. The spinner would not be seen at all during normal operation, without the delay in sending responses.
    - GekkePrutser 7y ago
      Then why do I still see them with my verified 600/600 connection :) The problem is just that there's too much javascript running in the browser and it's too poorly written (loading each post individually in Reddit by example instead of batching them). Reddit's redesign in particular is really really bad. At least they offer the old site but it looks so bad. I'd love to have something looking more modern but without the javascript overload.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  > Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster. That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been running commands to search/process data from the command line recently 1. Search through a directory structure with millions of files (find) 2. filter down to ones containing a certain thing (grep) 3. find certain values in the files based on pattern matching (sed) 4. filter to files where one value equals another (test) I can't imagine that would _ever_ finish running on a computer in the 80s. It works just fine on my current computer (albeit taking a minute to run).
  - 113 7y ago
    > Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? It's at the end of their comment.
    - cgriswald 7y ago
      That citation does not support the quoted claim.
    - RHSeeger 7y ago
      The page in question discusses latency in terminals, not how it compares to performance of previous generations. That being said, it also seems to have to pull in the 99th percentile behavior in order for the timings to be an issue, and even then it's not horrible; it doesn't get actually "bad" until you consider the worst performance (99.9th percentile) of the worst performer (st). It seems overly picky to me.
      - soulofmischief 7y ago
        https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ Here is another survey which takes it from a different angle. I should have clarified my original post but it's too late: I am lamenting primarily against the latency introduced by the amount of layers involved both at the hardware and software level compared to yesteryear. Compositors, virtualization, higher level languages, etc. do not come for free; despite explosive increases in computing capability, we also have an explosive increase in the number of running threads and the resources required to maintain them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ModernMech 7y ago
  There's also this: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/143 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/143 (Weird slowness scolling text in the console ) """ It's caused by conhost.exe excessively hammering the registry to query the following two values: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\TabletMode HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\ColorPrevalence Having previously reported this issue through Feedback Hub (to no avail), let me offer my observations from debugging this issue: It's not specific to Dell's XPS series - I've been able to reproduce on any Windows 10 installation from version 1703 and up It only occurs when the console application writes output that causes the console to scroll It only occurs when the console application in question is in foreground/focus Each reg value mentioned above is queried 6 times, per scroll!!! """ The solution I use is to minimize the terminal when it's scrolling. When I compile my projects if I don't minimize the terminal it takes forever to finish.
  - opless 7y ago
    It's a very common problem/solution. Since the beginning of Windows NT I believe
- mrdatawolf 7y ago
  "Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...item...was...written...to...the...screen. The OP has good points but the start was WEAK because it is factually inaccurate like your comment.
  - simonskoog 7y ago
    That still happens though, and it's not because it actually took 50ms for your computer to read a filename and 500 ms for it to read 10. It depends on how fast you allow items to be written (pixels per unit of time) on your display and if you force writing of everything or allow line skips. If you want to experiment I think putty has pretty fine-grain control options.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Right, I can recall the first time I saw my friend's parent's 486. I remember doing 'dir' on a large directory, it scrolled so fast, so fast. I said to my friend, "The next generation will be so fast it will have finished scrolling before you finish typing the command." Sadly, it was not to be. DOS on a 486 is as fast as computers have ever gotten, perceptually.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    The terminal is not experiencing input latency while the shell runs the dir program. The drawing program is experiencing latency. My comment is oversimplified for brevity, but not factually incorrect.
mfer 7y ago
> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users > I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing I still have computers that take some time to boot. Issue is, I just rarely power off/on. Instead the computers go to sleep which if much faster to come out of. Of all the tasks this is an uncommon one.
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  Nah, I still can't set up a linux that's both graphical and feels snappy to this day.
  - serverQuestion 7y ago
    could you do that in the past though?
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      I've been using Linux since... oh, 1999 or 2000, and I've never seen a Linux GUI desktop I'd describe as snappy and responsive. The best I've ever achieved is "not incredibly clunky" and that only by ensuring the graphical interface basically did nothing but run the current application or two I had open. I've seen BeOS, QNX, and (Apple) iOS graphical operating systems/environments that were consistently, remarkably snappy and responsive relative to comparable peers. That's... pretty much the entire list. CDE on a wonderfully powerful Solaris machine is close to making the cut. Never used Amiga but I hear it was good. Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK. [EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)
gridlockd 7y ago
Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. Even then, once the thing did boot up, applications were rather responsive. > ...you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. No, you can't. The majority of people uses software that is imposed upon them. The majority of work can not efficiently be expressed in CLIs. It's the responsibility of software developers to write responsive software and in many cases, they have failed. Of course, with the inefficient web platform, their job is made difficult from the start.
- emptyparadise 7y ago
  I feel bad for the metaphorical user. They were robbed of their tools. We get to keep our shell utilities and CLIs, but they were robbed of tiny single-purpose GUI tools. We get to keep our shell pipelines and perl scripts, but they're getting locked out of their Excel spreadsheets and VBA scripts. Hell, with how things are going even automation tools like AutoHotKey are going to perish. "People don't know how to code" or "users aren't tech-savvy enough for data processing and programming" are bullshit statements. They just happen to not code the way Silicon Valley does. And now these users are getting corralled into caged web apps and experiences that give them no flexibility at all and just treat them like children, all the way from the feature set to the presentation.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  > Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. That's been the issue with every Windows OS. The cheap consumer hardware available at the time of the release was not enough to provide a snappy OS experience. Unfortunately, hardware frequencies have sort of stalled, so now we're back to square 1 again, where W10 doesn't run snappy on median consumer hardware, but the hardware isn't getting faster at the same rate it was during the first decade of 2000's. I have a Windows 7 machine for some legacy games and software, and it feels much faster on a 6-year old CPU (Haswell) than W10 does on a 1 year old CPU.
  - 7y ago
tannhaeuser 7y ago
The BIOS POST message is still there btw even on eg Thinkpads (Phoenix BIOS), you just have to enable it in the ... BIOS.
- exikyut 7y ago
  Unfortunately enabling this means everybody within a 15 meter radius knows when my laptop has rebooted because this option also enables a BEEEEP that cannot be disabled or turned down. :( Can disable the low-battery beeping; cannot disable the POST beep unless you switch to vendor logo mode. (It's your standard old-style beep - just rendered through stereo speakers that have uncannily decent audio reproduction at that particular frequency for some reason. In a serene, quiet room.) 404 sense not found; please check the garbled and try again
emptyparadise 7y ago
A single longer wait is much better than constant tiny interruptions. I'd gladly wait for 10 minutes for my computer to boot up if it means that I get a seamless experience afterwards. Of course, your point about connection speeds is entirely right - but I don't think anybody would honestly advocate just entirely going back to 56k. Rather, we really should be trying to answer the question of why using a computer feels much more sluggish (probably a better word to use than slow) than it did back in the day. Yes, some of it is rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia, but most of what people discuss is worth taking into consideration. Nobody would seriously go and use a 20 year old computer unless they were making a statement of some sorts - and that statement is not "20 year old technology is entirely better than what we have today" but rather "why can't modern technology do things this 20 year old device can?"
IggleSniggle 7y ago
...I'm a little confused. My computer still flashes the motherboard manufacturer until the fans are all assessed and then the windows logo. And while my connection is fast, it's a lot less reliable than the one I had 20 years ago, with about three 15-minute disconnects per day on average (although that has more to do with the general shit-quality of the Comcast monopoly than anything else).
- wazanator 7y ago
  Check bios settings a lot of them let you configure that time. Worth keeping for a few seconds so you can hit the appropriate key to access bios again but can certainly turn it down.
- jedberg 7y ago
  But why do you turn the computer off? Thirty years ago the computer didn't have sleep. So it took a ton of power to have it sit on for no reason. I only reboot my machine for security updates now.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    Now I find that I often come to my computer and it has been turned off for me, due to frequent updates. 20 years ago, I would turn off the monitor to avoid burn-in, but typically just kept the computer on.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  Desktop machines may POST at a reasonable speed, but enterprise servers are still damn slow to start. Whether its the HP servers we deployed a few years back, or the more recent UCS servers we are building our new platform on, it takes ages for them to get to booting the OS (ESXi).
thedanbob 7y ago
I can still remember some of the text displayed when booting up my family's Win95 beige box because stayed up so long. Now if I'm trying to read an error message when booting even a slow modern computer I have to take a video and step through it frame by frame.
agumonkey 7y ago
Can't deny this. But there's a few other factors that I feel when using a computer. - linearity: logical steps are simple (boot, os, login, byte fetching) - predictability: it can be non instant but I know what's coming I had an old pentest distro with linux 2.4 on a key and a few recent ones using systemd and tailored DE. Whenever I used the old 2.4 era distro, maybe I had less capabilities overall, maybe a few glitches here and there, but somehow I felt in contact. Everything reacted as-is, throughput felt large (console output, file IO). Even the old sequential boot had a 'charm' to it. Even though systemd is so vastly superior in all aspects .. there was something that appealed to me. Weird.

by dayvid 7y ago

soulofmischief 7y ago

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/

GekkePrutser 7y ago
Not really :) Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed. However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.
- jws 7y ago
  Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud… The VMS manuals suggested that system administrators may want to keep the hard wired terminals down to 2400 buad and hide the fact from users by turning on "smooth scroll" (which only scrolled about that fast anyway) in order to keep the interrupt load down on the Vax. Something about batching of interrupts on the multiport serial cards.
  - GekkePrutser 7y ago
    Yes there was that but it also just couldn't handle the full speed continuously. It depended a lot what kind of commands were sent. Full text was fairly OK but drawing commands took a while as far as I remember. In any case, flow control was a must-have in those days. Either CTS/RTS or at least XON/XOFF
- ralusek 7y ago
  There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age...when spinners are almost exclusively used in web apps in order to denote that the web browser is yet to receive the necessary data over YOUR internet connection.
  - kokx 7y ago
    Tell that to my former boss. They wanted me to delay sending responses from the backend, because they liked showing off their custom spinner. The spinner would not be seen at all during normal operation, without the delay in sending responses.
  - GekkePrutser 7y ago
    Then why do I still see them with my verified 600/600 connection :) The problem is just that there's too much javascript running in the browser and it's too poorly written (loading each post individually in Reddit by example instead of batching them). Reddit's redesign in particular is really really bad. At least they offer the old site but it looks so bad. I'd love to have something looking more modern but without the javascript overload.
RHSeeger 7y ago
> Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster. That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been running commands to search/process data from the command line recently 1. Search through a directory structure with millions of files (find) 2. filter down to ones containing a certain thing (grep) 3. find certain values in the files based on pattern matching (sed) 4. filter to files where one value equals another (test) I can't imagine that would _ever_ finish running on a computer in the 80s. It works just fine on my current computer (albeit taking a minute to run).
- 113 7y ago
  > Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? It's at the end of their comment.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    That citation does not support the quoted claim.
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    The page in question discusses latency in terminals, not how it compares to performance of previous generations. That being said, it also seems to have to pull in the 99th percentile behavior in order for the timings to be an issue, and even then it's not horrible; it doesn't get actually "bad" until you consider the worst performance (99.9th percentile) of the worst performer (st). It seems overly picky to me.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ Here is another survey which takes it from a different angle. I should have clarified my original post but it's too late: I am lamenting primarily against the latency introduced by the amount of layers involved both at the hardware and software level compared to yesteryear. Compositors, virtualization, higher level languages, etc. do not come for free; despite explosive increases in computing capability, we also have an explosive increase in the number of running threads and the resources required to maintain them.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ModernMech 7y ago
There's also this: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/143 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/143 (Weird slowness scolling text in the console ) """ It's caused by conhost.exe excessively hammering the registry to query the following two values: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\TabletMode HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\ColorPrevalence Having previously reported this issue through Feedback Hub (to no avail), let me offer my observations from debugging this issue: It's not specific to Dell's XPS series - I've been able to reproduce on any Windows 10 installation from version 1703 and up It only occurs when the console application writes output that causes the console to scroll It only occurs when the console application in question is in foreground/focus Each reg value mentioned above is queried 6 times, per scroll!!! """ The solution I use is to minimize the terminal when it's scrolling. When I compile my projects if I don't minimize the terminal it takes forever to finish.
- opless 7y ago
  It's a very common problem/solution. Since the beginning of Windows NT I believe
mrdatawolf 7y ago
"Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...item...was...written...to...the...screen. The OP has good points but the start was WEAK because it is factually inaccurate like your comment.
- simonskoog 7y ago
  That still happens though, and it's not because it actually took 50ms for your computer to read a filename and 500 ms for it to read 10. It depends on how fast you allow items to be written (pixels per unit of time) on your display and if you force writing of everything or allow line skips. If you want to experiment I think putty has pretty fine-grain control options.
- carapace 7y ago
  Right, I can recall the first time I saw my friend's parent's 486. I remember doing 'dir' on a large directory, it scrolled so fast, so fast. I said to my friend, "The next generation will be so fast it will have finished scrolling before you finish typing the command." Sadly, it was not to be. DOS on a 486 is as fast as computers have ever gotten, perceptually.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  The terminal is not experiencing input latency while the shell runs the dir program. The drawing program is experiencing latency. My comment is oversimplified for brevity, but not factually incorrect.

mfer 7y ago

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users > I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing I still have computers that take some time to boot. Issue is, I just rarely power off/on. Instead the computers go to sleep which if much faster to come out of. Of all the tasks this is an uncommon one.

TheRealPomax 7y ago
Nah, I still can't set up a linux that's both graphical and feels snappy to this day.
- serverQuestion 7y ago
  could you do that in the past though?
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    I've been using Linux since... oh, 1999 or 2000, and I've never seen a Linux GUI desktop I'd describe as snappy and responsive. The best I've ever achieved is "not incredibly clunky" and that only by ensuring the graphical interface basically did nothing but run the current application or two I had open. I've seen BeOS, QNX, and (Apple) iOS graphical operating systems/environments that were consistently, remarkably snappy and responsive relative to comparable peers. That's... pretty much the entire list. CDE on a wonderfully powerful Solaris machine is close to making the cut. Never used Amiga but I hear it was good. Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK. [EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)

gridlockd 7y ago

Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. Even then, once the thing did boot up, applications were rather responsive. > ...you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. No, you can't. The majority of people uses software that is imposed upon them. The majority of work can not efficiently be expressed in CLIs. It's the responsibility of software developers to write responsive software and in many cases, they have failed. Of course, with the inefficient web platform, their job is made difficult from the start.

emptyparadise 7y ago
I feel bad for the metaphorical user. They were robbed of their tools. We get to keep our shell utilities and CLIs, but they were robbed of tiny single-purpose GUI tools. We get to keep our shell pipelines and perl scripts, but they're getting locked out of their Excel spreadsheets and VBA scripts. Hell, with how things are going even automation tools like AutoHotKey are going to perish. "People don't know how to code" or "users aren't tech-savvy enough for data processing and programming" are bullshit statements. They just happen to not code the way Silicon Valley does. And now these users are getting corralled into caged web apps and experiences that give them no flexibility at all and just treat them like children, all the way from the feature set to the presentation.
antisthenes 7y ago
> Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. That's been the issue with every Windows OS. The cheap consumer hardware available at the time of the release was not enough to provide a snappy OS experience. Unfortunately, hardware frequencies have sort of stalled, so now we're back to square 1 again, where W10 doesn't run snappy on median consumer hardware, but the hardware isn't getting faster at the same rate it was during the first decade of 2000's. I have a Windows 7 machine for some legacy games and software, and it feels much faster on a 6-year old CPU (Haswell) than W10 does on a 1 year old CPU.
- 7y ago

tannhaeuser 7y ago

The BIOS POST message is still there btw even on eg Thinkpads (Phoenix BIOS), you just have to enable it in the ... BIOS.

exikyut 7y ago
Unfortunately enabling this means everybody within a 15 meter radius knows when my laptop has rebooted because this option also enables a BEEEEP that cannot be disabled or turned down. :( Can disable the low-battery beeping; cannot disable the POST beep unless you switch to vendor logo mode. (It's your standard old-style beep - just rendered through stereo speakers that have uncannily decent audio reproduction at that particular frequency for some reason. In a serene, quiet room.) 404 sense not found; please check the garbled and try again

emptyparadise 7y ago

A single longer wait is much better than constant tiny interruptions. I'd gladly wait for 10 minutes for my computer to boot up if it means that I get a seamless experience afterwards. Of course, your point about connection speeds is entirely right - but I don't think anybody would honestly advocate just entirely going back to 56k. Rather, we really should be trying to answer the question of why using a computer feels much more sluggish (probably a better word to use than slow) than it did back in the day. Yes, some of it is rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia, but most of what people discuss is worth taking into consideration. Nobody would seriously go and use a 20 year old computer unless they were making a statement of some sorts - and that statement is not "20 year old technology is entirely better than what we have today" but rather "why can't modern technology do things this 20 year old device can?"

IggleSniggle 7y ago

...I'm a little confused. My computer still flashes the motherboard manufacturer until the fans are all assessed and then the windows logo. And while my connection is fast, it's a lot less reliable than the one I had 20 years ago, with about three 15-minute disconnects per day on average (although that has more to do with the general shit-quality of the Comcast monopoly than anything else).

wazanator 7y ago
Check bios settings a lot of them let you configure that time. Worth keeping for a few seconds so you can hit the appropriate key to access bios again but can certainly turn it down.
jedberg 7y ago
But why do you turn the computer off? Thirty years ago the computer didn't have sleep. So it took a ton of power to have it sit on for no reason. I only reboot my machine for security updates now.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Now I find that I often come to my computer and it has been turned off for me, due to frequent updates. 20 years ago, I would turn off the monitor to avoid burn-in, but typically just kept the computer on.
nineteen999 7y ago
Desktop machines may POST at a reasonable speed, but enterprise servers are still damn slow to start. Whether its the HP servers we deployed a few years back, or the more recent UCS servers we are building our new platform on, it takes ages for them to get to booting the OS (ESXi).

thedanbob 7y ago

I can still remember some of the text displayed when booting up my family's Win95 beige box because stayed up so long. Now if I'm trying to read an error message when booting even a slow modern computer I have to take a video and step through it frame by frame.

agumonkey 7y ago

Can't deny this. But there's a few other factors that I feel when using a computer. - linearity: logical steps are simple (boot, os, login, byte fetching) - predictability: it can be non instant but I know what's coming I had an old pentest distro with linux 2.4 on a key and a few recent ones using systemd and tailored DE. Whenever I used the old 2.4 era distro, maybe I had less capabilities overall, maybe a few glitches here and there, but somehow I felt in contact. Everything reacted as-is, throughput felt large (console output, file IO). Even the old sequential boot had a 'charm' to it. Even though systemd is so vastly superior in all aspects .. there was something that appealed to me. Weird.