Live data from Hacker News

Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

superuser.com

11–20 of 167 posts

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#11
Because everything takes non zero time. If a state transition from turned off to booted takes no time then doesn't that mean there is no state transition at all? The only way for it to take zero time for a computer to boot is if it is already booted or there is no difference between an unbooted computer and a booted one.

How much time does it take for a circle to become round? None at all. It happened instantly.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#12
post #2

More interesting question to me is why the hell some firmware boots take so long now. I know laptops from years ago much, much faster than what I have now, which is otherwise much faster than them. And the firmware initialization times for some servers I've seen seem completely obscene (on the order of minutes).

Probably because no one turns anything off anymore so the selection pressure is gone.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#13

Windows is a bloated mess, so it's obvious there. As for anything POSIX, it's because UNIX is shitware; it took a long time to boot decades ago and it takes a long time to boot now, because more garbage has been piled on top. It's possible for a good operating system to boot in less than a second, however. People have simply been conditioned to accept this unacceptable state of affairs, no different than a TV that ta…

I still remember the day I got a new TV (despite old CRT working) for my parents and see their faces the first time time we turned it on. Now they are used but at the beggining the boot time was difficult to grasp: it used to be negligible with the obsolete tech..

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#15
post #2

More interesting question to me is why the hell some firmware boots take so long now. I know laptops from years ago much, much faster than what I have now, which is otherwise much faster than them. And the firmware initialization times for some servers I've seen seem completely obscene (on the order of minutes).

Probably because no one turns anything off anymore so the selection pressure is gone.

So I'm not so sure about that. When I complained recently about sleep issues on my windows 10 desktop I was met with an overwhelming "but....why are you sleeping your desktop? Just switch it off like a normal person?".

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#16
When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. It was the same for the Acorn Archimedes in the UK. These computers had the entire GUI OS burnt into the ROM. After that I remember the shock or getting a 386 and waiting minutes for Windows 95 to load. It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#20

Because everything takes non zero time. If a state transition from turned off to booted takes no time then doesn't that mean there is no state transition at all? The only way for it to take zero time for a computer to boot is if it is already booted or there is no difference between an unbooted computer and a booted one. How much time does it take for a circle to become round? None at all. It happened instantly.

It also takes hours to compile everything from scratch, but we don't see computers taking hours to boot, do we? Most of the process "from initial state" is cached, and there is little reason to not keep the trend.

Booting, as in detecting and initializing the hardware, including the RAM, should only be needed when hardware is changed, and even then it should be possible to cache the state of any unchanged parts.

Post reply on HN