It's a pretty good point, ordinary computers could boot up from cold in under 30 seconds on 5400 rpm spinning rust, so why can't they boot up in under 1 second on the latest and greatest NVMe SSDs?
Windows 95 was about 50MB installed with most features.
Windows 2000 fit on a CD for the install.
Current Windows 10 installers won't even fit on a single layer DVD anymore, and forget doing the install with a FAT32 USB stick (some older UEFIs won't handle exFAT yet).
The fastest computer I've ever used, perceptually, was a dual Pentium 3 866, with Rambus, booting XP (probably SP1 or so) on 15k U320 SCSI disk. The thing was telepathic.
How I coveted my roommate's machine that had one in it.
I think it's the old problem where the more crap windows accumulates, the longer it takes to boot.
Extrapolate to everything else and it becomes pretty clear. There's just so much more to load.
Even factoring in 100x more resource usage for a 2023 computer to deliver all the features expected, it definitely should be way under 2.2 seconds.
That's 25,000x more usage of memory for the interface alone.
Display memory usage made nowhere near a straight multiplier of a difference even in 1989, as demonstrated by the 1000RLX vs 1000RL, which you would have known if you followed the link in the other comment and watched the video.
You can verify this yourself by hooking up a VGA resolution display, the same as the 1989 Tandy 1000RLX shown, to a modern desktop computer with VGA out and it doesn't reduce boot times by any significant amount.
Total resource demands are still way, way, way over 100x. Data speeds. Peripheral inputs. Storage. Basically everything.
And no, of course a computer doesn't boot at a different speed depending on display size. It's about the assets and code that fill displays of that size -- all the graphics you've got to load, all the code that has to draw the antialiasing and transparencies and shadows and subpixel font ligatures and everything else.
Same way the code for dealing with storage capabilities is way more than 100x as complex. For peripherals. Etc etc etc.
Do you understand how VGA displays or graphics rendering work? Or how computers boot up?
A modern linux system, RHEL, Debian, etc..., isn't going to try to load 4K graphics on a single connected VGA display, especially if you use it without any third party video drivers or adaptors that support 4K video out.
Many motherboards, even in 2023, have a direct VGA out port that it defaults to, reliably. Which is what this typically refers to.
If your still worried, then there's always the option to manually verify the installed files and boot sequence to confirm that it isn't attempting to force it.
It's simply the point that there's so much more to load during booting. Your contention that computers only use 100x more resources than in 1984, and should therefore boot in "way under 2.2 seconds" is way, way off.
Computers use way, way, way more than 100x resources compared to two decades ago. Hence, booting still takes a bit of time. It's pretty simple.
> Icons used to be 32x32 monochrome with a mask. Now they're 512x512 in 48-bit color. System fonts used to have ~200 characters, now they have tens of thousands. Extrapolate to everything else and it becomes pretty clear. There's just so much more to load.
If so, let me spell it out step by step. That was the initial reply to me. Therefore...
> I was using 4K screens as just one example of the many, many dimensions of growth.
This example, is likely close to meaningless, as elaborated on previously.
Hence why I suggested to review whether '32x32 monochrome' or '512x512 in 48 bit color', etc., has any observable effect. With the help of a VGA display showing, presumably, graphics roughly corresponding to the first, another display corresponding to the second, and so on.
If you want to discuss something later on, then it should be in your interest to resolve the first claim as soon as possible in your favour.
For example, if you disagree and still think resolution makes a noticeable difference, then show that convincingly, especially as it's a positive claim, which HN readers tend to treat more critically.
It really seems a bit odd to try to skip that discussion and then claim it 'has nothing to do with VGA' which can only reduce the possible avenues to prove your credibility.
i.e. You are the one who raised the possible "to do" regarding lower resolutions. The reason why I started discussing 'VGA' at all was because of that comment.
Honestly, things are much faster now than they used to be.
Plus I can shut my laptop lid, use basically no power, and come back to my session as-is almost instantly. That's new and way better than the 80s and 90s. Then you either had to leave the machine on or suffer slow cold boots.
https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1278 — I think about 12 seconds, or which 3-4 is waiting for two hard drives to spin up.
(I think some viruses loaded themselves with this mechanism. And virus checkers.)
https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/File%20fo...
The OS in ROM was 2MiB, and looking at some module files intended for potential loading at boot time I have in an emulator, they are around 5-40kiB.
The computers typically had 2 or 4MiB RAM, so there isn't space to replace a significant amount of the OS anyway. (1MiB or 8MiB was possible, but unusual.)
If you wanted the full multitasking modern version of the OS (MultiTOS), you loaded parts of it from disk. Or ran SysV Unix (or NetBSD or Linux, later).
Then again, binary sizes would be smaller on a CISC 68k machine I'd expect.
I don't remember what happened if you configured it to look for extra boot files on a floppy disc, but the drive was empty. I think it would give up very quickly (1-2 seconds), as it was a normal way to load a program on the earlier BBC computers — insert the program disc, which would be bootable, and press the key combination (Shift+Break) to reset.
"Podules" (expansion cards) could also map extra modules into the OS from their own ROM, usually the required device drivers for the card.
[1] https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/*Configur...
add to that that people think that because machines are faster they don’t need to optimize anything.
The ~4 seconds to boot up to a GUI desktop is actually even more impressive: https://youtu.be/JIEPqD4luG8?si=9gVtFCIxFYma1erC&t=556
My top of the line i9-9880H Macbook Pro from 2019, with PCIe 4.0 NVMe speeds, needs over 20 seconds to boot up in comparison...
Maybe your PC "trains" the memory every boot instead of just the first one.
https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/ddr5-mem...
It's not only the multiple 15-minute RAM boot times (!?) that are worrying: it's that I'd have zero visibility into what underlying cause is responsible for these "small number" of events, and what other symptoms could develop later on (outside the RMA window). I couldn't just take the manufacturer's reassurance at face value.
https://www.systemverilog.io/design/ddr4-initialization-and-...
Simply put, strip down an OS to the same feature set of that ancient computer and the modern OS will be a lot faster. Some of the networkless VMs I mess with boot in a second or two, but you see we've abstracted most of the hardware away. So, mostly the problem is a hardware one.