3 ms·

Cable modems and servers weren’t designed for standby. Also, if we’re talking consumer tech from the 1970’s or 1980’s, I think it’s twofold. Firstly, the mark

Cable modems and servers weren’t designed for standby. Also, if we’re talking consumer tech from the 1970’s or 1980’s, I think it’s twofold. Firstly, the market cared more about “time to wake up” than about power usage. People had fewer devices, they were (relatively) more expensive, and people were used to fully switching off stuff, so standby power usage wasn’t seen as a big issue. Secondly, the tech itself didn’t exist. Nowadays, your power supply has a CPU that knows how much power your hardware needs and can optimize for it. Then, you would be lucky if your hardware had a switching power supply. CPUs didn’t have power states. If you were lucky, you could halt them and have them start again on interrupt. Hibernation didn’t exist, so in computers you’d have to power RAM, anyways. And because of that, OSes didn’t bother with the complex task of properly powering down peripherals when going on standby.

sidewndr46 4y ago
What power supply has CPU in it?
- hug 4y ago
  Every macbook power supply from who knows when does. Here's a teardown of a 2015 macbook pro charger that includes a Texas Instruments MSP430. https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surp...
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    That's a microcontroller.
    - hug 4y ago
      > The MSP430 is a mixed-signal microcontroller family from Texas Instruments, first introduced on 14 February 1992.[1] Built around a 16-bit CPU From Wikipedia. Emphasis mine.
barrkel 4y ago
In the 80s, your VCR would frequently be plugged in, and it would keep pumping out a placeholder blue screen at a minimum, particularly if connected via antenna passthrough. However startup time would be minimal - a couple of seconds - compared to warmup for the CRT, which would usually be at least 10 seconds before it would look settled. But I recall devices generally being much faster to start up. A C64 would boot to READY prompt in 3 seconds. The penalty for turning off completely and needing to wait for boot was small, and for computing devices, wait time was dominated by loading, not booting. You might have to wait for a rewind with a VCR, and you'd certainly wait for tape loading on devices in the C64 class. Consoles with cartridges didn't take long to boot up and load though.

sidewndr46 4y ago

What power supply has CPU in it?

hug 4y ago
Every macbook power supply from who knows when does. Here's a teardown of a 2015 macbook pro charger that includes a Texas Instruments MSP430. https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surp...
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  That's a microcontroller.
  - hug 4y ago
    > The MSP430 is a mixed-signal microcontroller family from Texas Instruments, first introduced on 14 February 1992.[1] Built around a 16-bit CPU From Wikipedia. Emphasis mine.

barrkel 4y ago

In the 80s, your VCR would frequently be plugged in, and it would keep pumping out a placeholder blue screen at a minimum, particularly if connected via antenna passthrough. However startup time would be minimal - a couple of seconds - compared to warmup for the CRT, which would usually be at least 10 seconds before it would look settled. But I recall devices generally being much faster to start up. A C64 would boot to READY prompt in 3 seconds. The penalty for turning off completely and needing to wait for boot was small, and for computing devices, wait time was dominated by loading, not booting. You might have to wait for a rewind with a VCR, and you'd certainly wait for tape loading on devices in the C64 class. Consoles with cartridges didn't take long to boot up and load though.