3 ms·

There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my cr

There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance for the impatient. Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.

bombcar 1y ago
Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was colored by “how fast did it boot”?
- II2II 1y ago
  I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long time. I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
    - II2II 1y ago
      The irony is that I started recompiling the kernel because it wouldn't detect a SCSI card unless parameters were passed to the kernel ... then I learned how long autoprobing was taking for hardware that I didn't even have! Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).
      - bombcar 1y ago
        The real performance gains were just about the -i386 to pentium jump; a bunch of distros only shipped the most compatible code and didn’t use the newer instructions. I always found that optimizing for size and using the exact march/mcpu worked nicely. But the biggest part I liked was being able to turn off features I didn’t need (like mpg123 in a headless server NOT pulling in X).
acdha 1y ago
The one which got me was the time I had music playing, a large C++ build going, and transferring video from a FireWire card with a tiny buffer simultaneously … and everything not only worked but the UI responsiveness didn’t change at all. For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like. Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining. Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.
  - acdha 1y ago
    Yeah, macOS 7-9 had known weaknesses (e.g. burning CD coasters or skipping audio if you held down the mouse button, keeping it in an interrupt handler) but they were more deterministic and people could avoid them. The DOS-based Windows versions were just plain bad, and only Microsoft’s illegal product tying kept competitors off of the market. Windows NT 3 was at least stable, but they made it worse moving drivers into the kernel for performance in 4, and it took decades to repair the security damage that caused.

bombcar 1y ago

Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was colored by “how fast did it boot”?

II2II 1y ago
I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.
- bombcar 1y ago
  That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long time. I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
  - II2II 1y ago
    The irony is that I started recompiling the kernel because it wouldn't detect a SCSI card unless parameters were passed to the kernel ... then I learned how long autoprobing was taking for hardware that I didn't even have! Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).
    - bombcar 1y ago
      The real performance gains were just about the -i386 to pentium jump; a bunch of distros only shipped the most compatible code and didn’t use the newer instructions. I always found that optimizing for size and using the exact march/mcpu worked nicely. But the biggest part I liked was being able to turn off features I didn’t need (like mpg123 in a headless server NOT pulling in X).

acdha 1y ago

The one which got me was the time I had music playing, a large C++ build going, and transferring video from a FireWire card with a tiny buffer simultaneously … and everything not only worked but the UI responsiveness didn’t change at all. For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like. Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining. Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.
- acdha 1y ago
  Yeah, macOS 7-9 had known weaknesses (e.g. burning CD coasters or skipping audio if you held down the mouse button, keeping it in an interrupt handler) but they were more deterministic and people could avoid them. The DOS-based Windows versions were just plain bad, and only Microsoft’s illegal product tying kept competitors off of the market. Windows NT 3 was at least stable, but they made it worse moving drivers into the kernel for performance in 4, and it took decades to repair the security damage that caused.