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Comment by micv | Hacker News Reader

We had loads of these old Archimedes computers at school until the late 90s when IBM-compatibles took over. I remember them taking absolutely forever to boot up for some reason. They were fast enough when they got going, but oh boy did they take a while to get going.

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You can see the typical boot sequence of a standalone machine here [1]. It's about 10 seconds.

Underpowered networks / network servers in a school could increase this, if the computer was configured to load resources from the network at boot.

https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1284 (this is an A5000, but the startup time is similar).

I think that's probably it. They were all hooked up to a network, and it was never anything other than ropey.

Thats odd cause the OS was on rom. I remember them taking just a couple of seconds to boot. Now at my school most the machines were "just" networked and didn't contain their own hard drives (Though the A5000's did have their own drives as well as being networked).

Applications that were not on the rom were loaded from the network which meant if all the kids loaded differnt things all at the same time the network/fileserver could get congested witch slowed loading times but I don't recall loading times being too bad but that might just be recalling the experiance though rose tinted glasses.

This allowed finer control of the applications what could be installed as the network was kept in read only mode for most of the time and only swapped into write enabled mode when updates and new applications were needed to be installed. the Read Only/Write Enable switch was a keyswitch on the fileserver case which was stored in a locked room. For the age it was "enough" security.

I have fond memories of the Archimedes as the first time I got paid for my code it was written on one.

Earlier models (such as the A3000 my family bought in the early '90s) booted from ROM and would drop you at a desktop in literally 1-2 seconds. The POST screen was basically just "RISC OS 2.00 2048K RAM" (or something along those lines) and then all of a sudden it shows the desktop ready to use. Sadly later models would boot from HDD instead (copying the approach used by Microsoft for Windows) and these took ages to boot.

They still booted to a desktop from ROM, but the hard disc boot sequence had to update lots of kernel modules that had since been updated. Acorn would roll those updates back into the next version of the RISC OS ROMs, and (for some computers) you could buy newer ROMs. But the boot sequence generally took longer as time went on (though still only 10-15s from my memory).

This was probably Econet and network !boot stuff. That was horribly slow. Stand-alone boot was about 5 seconds.

Usually the schools has MDFS filers from BBC days being repurposed as econet servers which could barely cope with the load of a room full of machines coming up.

The IBM compatibles that seemed to replace them from RM were complete dogshit. Fortunately they killed that half way through the rollout when my sister was at school and went full netware instead.

I’m feeling old now.

Those RM machines were terrible.

My secondary school was entirely Acorn and we'd had Amigas, Acorns and then Macs at home. I'd never really encountered Wintel until Sixth Form, where the college was full of Windows 3.1-era RMs.

Couldn't believe how primitive they were - compared to Workbench and RiscOS it was like stepping back into some terrible technological past. Don't think I used them willingly once in the whole time I was there. Still never used Windows much.

Going from the Amiga or Archimedes to Windows 3.1 would have been painful. I'm glad I didn't get into the PC until Win 95 had showed up and got it to a semi-reasonable point.

It's still painful trying to use any other GUI

Those weren't even fully-compatible PCs though, were they? If I remember correctly, the really popular ones were 80186-based.

Indeed. They weren’t real PCs. Complete software and hardware lock in from RM.

If I remember correctly Econet was only clocked at 200kbps and sharing that between 30 machines in a classroom doesn't give much for each of them!

The boot was from ROM and I remember them starting up pretty quickly, however there were also network options which might have slowed something down.

I'm almost certainly remembering this wrong, but I believe these machines supported EcoNET with 10 base-T ethernet being available later with an addon podule. At my high school we did network authentication to log on and then also had access to our private folder which was also a network share, as well as some of the applications / boot scripts being on a network drive. The 3020's were surprisingly slow if you used the TCP/IP stack. I have fond memories of waiting for someone to start a game (Aarknoid iirc) and then sending flood pings to their IP causing the system to slow down to about 2fps. Fun times. I don't remember this being a problem on the A4000 or any of the RISC-PC range.

If you're based in the UK and need an Acorn nostalgia hit, then the Wakefield Acorn Users Group still has monthly meetings.

I also have very vivid memories of getting an x86 addon card (probably a 486) for one of our early RISC machines and being able to run Windows 95 within a window from the Acorn desktop; mind blowing in the late 90's.

TLDR: I remember the 3020 booting quickly, but the network services were slooooow.

If you use RISCOS on a Raspberry Pi, it boots really fast. It's just a few seconds.

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