> You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font. Drawing the backstop window was forcing the rasterization of an entirely new font, which was costing time and memory for something that shouldn’t ever be seen in the first place.

Wow, I never thought an entire operating system could be crippled by font load times. Must be a problem I'm too linux & vector font to understand.