Hacker News Reader

Comment by vincent-manis | Hacker News Reader

I'm a proponent of minimalist software design (I wish Plan 9 had won!), but I frankly can't figure out what the author is trying to say. I'm not knowledgeable about the Futurist movement, but I can't see what it might have to say about software design. And I completely lost interest when I got to the bullet point “Structured programming = slow”.

My Linux laptop boots in about 20 seconds. CRT TV's took longer than that to warm up.

Maybe I over-value coherence.

View on HN

Oh, don't worry, they have a list of boot times:

> Television - 3 seconds

> Automobile - 2 seconds

> Microwave oven - less than 1 second

> Video game - less than 1 second

> Unix workstation - 120 seconds or more

Yeah, those times are bullshit. Please tell me what platform has a video game boot in less than a second, because it hasn't been true for any generation of console I've played on (which dates back to the Sega Genesis).

This feels like it was written around 1995 (the newest reference is 1994, and the "hot new technology" they're shitting on is C++, which suggests that Java hasn't come out yet). There's a general smug air of "real programmers use assembly." For bonus points, they also criticize computer scientists on the basis of "most NEW ideas are feared and rejected", which is honestly a pretty good summary of the diatribe.

Ha. Thanks for mentioning video games in 1 second. I was wondering what universe had video games booting in 1 second, because I'd like to get in on that.

Given the rest of the paper it's probably referring to the SNES and Genesis, which is about right.

I don't know. I count the logo loading screen (i.e. Sonic the Hedgehog had an incoming "Sega!" announcer and logo, which is at least 2-3 seconds). It's much faster than the loading times of current consoles, but not 1 second.

NES might qualify, as it often "loaded" (turned on) right into the title screen.

Is there really any "loading" going on, or is that just a branding screen? Those consoles use ROM chips that were fast enough, and the Genesis, for example, only had 64 KB of RAM, so there wasn't even the need or possibility for "loading" a lot of things into the RAM like today, nor was the CPU fast enough to compute anything during boot that couldn't be pre-loaded into the ROM.

I also remember some of those being totally skippable as well, not only in the Genesis but also in other consoles. On the Neo Geo, for example (same CPU as the Genesis, 68000), putting a coin completely skips the (kinda long) 7 second logo intro.

> I count the logo loading screen

That's a pretty unfair metric, then, considering that said delay is entirely artificial and is part of the game itself.

What actually happens while the logo is showing? Is that really a loading screen or does it always have to be there for contract reasons?

N64 booted immediately. Popping Yoshi Story in and hitting that switch gives you an immediate "NEN-TAYN-DOU" in the voice of a small army of Yoshis. I'd say it boots in under a second.

Any cartridge-based game console before CD-ROMs became popular did that (at the cost of smaller game worlds, obviously). The cartridges contained ROM chips which were directly 'bank-switched' into the CPU address space instead of providing a 'filesystem' to load from.

Basically every console before Xbox and PlayStation loaded games in seconds.

That’s not because of better software though. Games were just so much smaller then.

So if a 128k game loads in less than a second, and the 4.7G DVD version of the same game takes 30 seconds, I would probably wait 30 seconds for the DVD version.

From the user's perspective, a PS5 appears to launch the most recently played game in about 1 second. A better word would probably be "resuming" than "booting."

By that logic resuming the “unix workstation” from sleep is <1 second

My NES will boot games in < 1 second (at least when it was new - nowadays I have to fiddle with the buttons a bit)

Minesweeper open instantly.

It's running on top of an already booted OS, though maybe that's what the author had in mind.

I think the point here isn't about how quickly videogames or consoles boot, but rather that if your program takes longer to start than a significantly more complicated videogame from the same era, then you're doing it wrong, and as a result wasting your users' time.

It's a view I shared in the past - it held throughout the entire "desktop computing era", until consoles and PCs started to converge, and the asset bundle size of a typical game inflated rapidly.

Back when video games came on ROM cartridges (before CD-ROMS), there would be no 'loading process' at all since all data is already mapped into memory. There may be a couple of logos at startup, but that's just wasting user time, not to hide any 'loading'.

The fact that game consoles have become more and more like PCs in terms of user experience over the decades is actually pretty sad.

I mean, isn't that kind of the problem? The technology of yesteryear was orders of magnitude slower and less resourceful, but today many tasks take orders of magnitude more time and resources for not even close to an order of magnitude more utility.

8-bit computers:

instant on to command prompt

  READY.

computers get a floppy disk drive:

boot from floppy disk wait for command prompt

  DOS VERSION 3.3

computers get a hard disk and can store more stuff like startup scripts:

boot hard disk, startup script runs, wait longer for command prompt

  C:\>

computers get Graphical Operating Systems:

startup screen, wait for desktop to load, wait even longer to open a command prompt program

computers can be multi-user:

start up screen, wait for desktop to load, login, wait even a bit longer to open a command prompt program

  Password:

computers and the internet are ubiquitous:

start up screen, wait for desktop to load, login, get distracted by web browser, forget to open the command prompt program

www

tiny devices are everywhere:

the battery in my phone is dead.

The Futurists were over-the-top (and sometimes more typographically out-there than this web page, in a pre-DTP time!) so I highly doubt the page is meant to be taken entirely seriously.

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking or http://www.designhistory.org/Avant_Garde_pages/Futurism.html

Yep. There is (in my opinion) a genealogical line that connects Futurism to Dada to Punk. Certainly their typography presents very similarly. In spirit, they all spent a lot of energy rejecting the status quo and not much in developing alternatives.

The original Futurist Manifesto (1909) [1] is indeed over-the-top and out-there. Much more about them in Wikipedia [2]. I don't see the connection between those original Futurists and the linked Futurist Programming article, maybe none was intended.

1. https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manif...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism

What kind of TVs did you have? The CRT TVs I remember in the 1990s and 2000s all "booted" in 1-3 seconds from no power to displaying proper image. The flat-ish and flat TVs that came later also booted comparably quickly. It's only when Smart TVs appeared that I first saw a TV taking more than 5 seconds to start.

(I'm counting the time it took a TV to show broadcast programming or "normal" cable programming. IIRC cable decoder boxes would introduce some extra delay here for "cold start", but those boxes were all shitty garbage from the same kind of companies that now sell smart TVs, and we didn't use them anyway.)

Yep. I remember analog cable/satellite decoder boxes and even the first-generation digital ones being almost instantaneous too.

It was only when they became more like a computer that it started going down. When they started getting remote updates it became a nightmare.

The set-top box I had before cord-cutting was "always on", and consumed quite a lot of power even when "turned off". It was extremely hot all day. Pulling the plug off the wall when not using was enough to save money, but then it take a full minute to power on, and then it had to wait for something from the satellite. I eventually bought a timer so it would turn on at 8am.

> ...about 20 seconds. CRT TV's took longer than that to warm up

You must have had a very crappy CRT TV :) A good TV (or CRT computer monitor) was available near-instantly, and also switched channels much faster than a modern 'digital' TV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com