this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world -2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I think many programmers and business models have given up on programs running 'fast' but rather they just running and shoving them out quickly. Add in all the AI programming, and I don't see it getting better. It's basically like most people when they earn more income. The more speed and memory a computer has, the more programmers will use of it.

A computer from the 80's starts up a million times faster than any modern computer.

[–] kandykarter@lemmy.ca 14 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

That's nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.

[–] cenzorrll@piefed.ca 1 points 5 hours ago

I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.

When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.

My dad had a C64 that I'd play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 5 points 13 hours ago

Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world -1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

You realize most computers in the 80's instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I'm sorry, are you fairly young?

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.

So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world -1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Except they did instantly boot. I didn't say anything about how long they took to load a program, and if you had a cartridge, it instantly loaded as well. Have you actually used these computers, or just remember slow tape drives? Not that modern ones are fast by any means either, they just move more data and are prohibitively expensive.

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It’s easy to “boot up instantly” when not even the OS is loaded.

Modern BIOS load also instantly. Care to explain what you can do with that?

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed. Care to explain what you can do with that? You could easily boot DOS within 40 seconds on a 486. Can't do that on Windows at all these days and we are talking 30 years later.

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Sure, let’s compare a single user, 16 bit, text only OS, with Windows.

Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed.

Again, apples and oranges.

I/O drivers were stored as part of the ROM in both Apple and Commodore. That’s your ancient equivalent to BIOS and kernel. But they loaded essentially nothing, and didn’t need to handle a myriad of different devices and interfaces. The whole thing took a few kilobytes of storage, and obviously, wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t very specifically supported.

A modern Linux kernel would also boot in a couple seconds if we were to strip every single driver from it but the handful needed to handle a monitor, an input device, storage, etc. The moment you plugged in a mouse, it wouldn’t work, and without an UI or even an interpreter, it would be useless. And I can assure you, it is way faster to load zsh in a modern computer, than any BASIC interpreter on an Apple II.