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That does not match my memory at all. Booting my family’s 386, even into DOS, was a minutes-long affair involving memory tests and messages like “loading HIMEM.SYS”.

You're thinking 10 years too late. The TRS-80, C64, Apple ][ all booted in seconds.

Fun that it has oscillated from instant boot then to minutes-long boot a decade later back to instant boot (or resume to be fair) today.

Any sort of GUI took a minute or two to boot. My laptop today is ready to go before I get the lid fully open.

Turning my computer took a few minutes. It would do the RAM check (all 640K of it), at a fairly slow pace.