this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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 1 day 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 4 points 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Except the basic premise is true, and you can't deny it. Those computers booted to a workable interface far quicker than any modern computer. Modern phones shouldn't need the same level of bloat as modern computers, so your Linux argument fails there as well. Feel free to let us know when android instantly boots, or iOS, even though both have to support very few 'different devices and interfaces'.

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago

A dishwasher also “boots up” instantly, and they come with WiFi now! The point is that they are not comparable.

Modern phones shouldn't need the same level of bloat as modern computers, so your Linux argument fails there as well.

I see. You haven’t any working understanding of computers and logics. That explains a lot.

People like you are so detached from the actual complexity of modern interfaces like USB, you don’t even know that there was a time we couldn’t even plug in a mouse without having to restart the whole computer, or that there were six different video interfaces incompatible with each other, etc.

This fake ass “things were faster before” is laughable. Yeah, go ahead and display a 32-bit color image in DOS while playing a sound file. Oh, it doesn’t have a complex compositor and a window manager? It cannot handle multitasking? It doesn’t even load your sound card drivers outside of an application? No shit.