I don’t understand why you are being downvoted. Flip the switch and the BASIC prompt was essentially instantaneous.

Boot times are faster than they were in 1986. I feel comfortable assuming they're also faster than they were in 1983.

SSDs are fast.

> "SSDs are fast."

ROM is faster. That's what microcomputers booted off in 1983.

A powered-off Apple 2 or C64 could be operational in seconds. We're nowhere close to that now.

A powered-off Dell laptop running Windows 10 is operational in seconds. I know this because that's what I use.

Whereas an IBM PC booting into DOS in 1986 took, sure, seconds, but a lot more seconds. You could read a lot of the messages as they scrolled by during boot.

To get to a BIOS configuration screen now, you need to independently research the key that will bring it up and memorize it. Then you have to frantically mash it during the whole very brief boot process, because there's only a split second during which it will actually work. It used to just be a boot message. When you saw the message, you had time to hit F12 or whatever.

If it's operational in seconds it was hibernated or suspended.

Windows now by default has "quick startup" which is effectively log the user out kill their apps and hibernate.

Beware if you dual boot and want to access the windows files or your machine does not handle hibernation well.

Actual startup probably takes more like 20-40 seconds

> If it's operational in seconds it was hibernated or suspended.

This is not true. Are you still using a platter hard drive? (If an SSD, have you looked up benchmarks for it?)

My ~5 year old laptop used to cold boot Windows 7 in less than 10 seconds (once I'd disabled most autostarting programs, at least). It currently cold boots Ubuntu in ~5 or so; most of that time is spent displaying the UEFI and Grub splash screens. This is made possible _almost entirely_ by a Samsung Evo; I'm looking forward to getting an M.2 drive when I replace the computer.

Are you pressing the button to start and externally timing the process of arriving at a usable desktop and have you explicitly disabled fast boot? This isn't a new feature in windows 10.

Internally my computer tells me the process takes about 5 seconds from the OS start to graphical environment but in reality there are several steps. For example this doesn't account for the period of time between hitting the power button and the OS itself starting to run, entering full disk encryption password, unlocking volume.

I would be surprised if a full restart actually took so short. Maybe not loading a menu or unlocking a volume is sufficient to explain the difference?

I often hear hibernation is one of the great Mac Os Features. For my part, I decided years ago that cold booting windows works much faster than hibernating it.

I will not start to count the seconds and fight which OS boots faster, but it is certainly much faster than it was in the nineties. Boot times are certainly one thing where modern computers have significantly improved. Everyone who compares an instant on 8-bit is oversimplifying things. Try booting to ie. GEOS on one of those.

That's windows. In Linux, I get this from cold boot (on an Thinkpad T495):

    > systemd-analyze 
    Startup finished in 8.878s (firmware) + 1.666s (loader) + 1.592s (kernel) + 3.265s (userspace) = 15.403s 
    graphical.target reached after 3.176s in userspace

It's crazy that the slowest part of the whole process is the firmware stuff.

Is that wall clock time? I get 13s but actual wall clock time is more like 26 from power on to desktop. Around 30 seconds to opening a browser.

I haven't check wall clock; I would have to enable auto-login to eliminate pauses from user interaction.

> I would have to enable auto-login to eliminate pauses from user interaction.

Why? By the time you're logging in, booting is already finished.

To check at what point the system is responsive enough to launch a browser. So, not just calculating the boot times (we have that already), but from power on to launching a browser.

While that's not an entirely unreasonable idea, I note that launching a browser has its own startup time. Power on to opening a document in evince is faster than power on to launching a browser, and that's support for the original thesis in a way, but it also feels like a little much to count it against "boot time".

Just tested mine from totally off to login screen, took slightly over 12 seconds.

A powered off Dell laptop is not nearly as fast as a TRS-80 Model 4.

I used to use Apple 2. Powered on Apple 2 is practically useless - it doesn't do anything useful until much later.

My Chromebook boots in seconds, with full GUI and everything and usable. My Windows desktop boots in seconds and usable. I'd say anyone saying Apple 2 was faster is comparing apples (ahem) to oranges. In no way Apple 2 provided faster user experience for anything compared to modern machines.

That's because it doesn't do anything. We expect many orders of magnitude more functionality from a modern computer than we expected back then.

Remember when OS's had startup bleeps/bloops to entertain us while they booted? Those were the days. Now I'm completely irked waiting for an old 5400 RPM drive to boot Fedora on the occasion I need to do it.

You felt like you really got your money’s worth when that counter slowly ground it’s way up to “8192KB RAM OK”

The POST alone for my AT clone took over a minute. I remember watching it count up to 512k.

1992ish?

No, I definitely had upgraded to 1MB by 1992. The AT clone was an old CAD computer my dad's work had gotten rid of in the late 80s.