I understand that processing power was lacking but surely the os of yore must have had much smaller requirements. Also let’s assume we are booting up offline and no updates are indicated. What was Windows doing for 3 – 5 minutes that my android phone manages to zip through in 15 seconds?
In: Technology
Computers had a lot less memory (like 0.1% of what is common now), so they used something called ‘swap’ which took inactive data out of RAM and wrote it to a spinning-disk hard drive. As hard drives we’re super expensive (200 bucks for 1/2 gig) this was also the same drive the software and OS was loading from….
The hard drives of the 1990s (ATA/IDE) were massively slower both in rotational speed and data transfer bandwidth than current mechanical hard drives – let alone solid state storage …
And that limited bandwidth is being used both to load software and to economize RAM.
On top of that everything else was slower and had less bandwidth……
A lighter OS only goes so far….
Have you ever used a record player? You lay the needle down at the outside, and it follows a groove that runs in a spiral toward the center. If you want to skip a song, you have to pick the needle up and move it to the location of the spot you want to listen to.
Now imagine trying to listen to 1 second of thousands of different songs on a giant record. That’s similar to what an old computer is doing.
The hard drive in an old computer used metal plates that spin around as a little arm moves across the surface reading magnetic charges stored in concentric rings on the surface of the metal.
As the computer needs to access files in various locations, the little arm as to move around to each of these locations. This made accessing lots of tiny files *very* slow. Guess what’s needed when you start a computer? Access to lots of tiny files.
Modern computers use something called solid state memory for storage. This type of drive stores data in a series of tiny little binary switches that can be read by the circuitry directly. There’s no needle required, and no moving parts at all.
Biggest thing is storage. The biggest part of booting up an OS is moving a ton of data into memory aka RAM all at once so that the OS can function properly. Phones and newer computers use flash aka solid state storage of some sort which exponentially faster than Tradition disk based storage so that massively speeds up boot times. On top of that ram is a lot faster than it used to be and so are CPUs. The amount of work that needs be done to boot an OS has not increased all that much in the grand scheme of things either so you can get much better boot times than were possible say just decade ago.
To be fair. My new Win 11 install starts slower then when it was Win 10
7 through 10 were all pretty snappy.
XP did take its time.
Everything before that naturally was on much slower hardware.
Processing power wasn’t that much of a bottleneck, storage was the main culprit, spinning drives are slow, that’s why you can take pretty much any decade old system put a ssd on it and suddenly it’s way better not only at boot but in general responsiveness
As hardware technology advances, so does the bloat of Windows. Windows 10 and 11 are vastly more complex than windows XP, so it is doing more, but doing it faster with better hardware.
Solid State Drives can read up to 7500 MB per second, where even the best Hard Disk Drives would barely reach 45 MB per second.
Loading an operating system is not like loading just another app, so that read speed made a huge difference.
Believe it or not, before computers booting up got slow, they were actually really quick, too.
An old DOS machine would boot up in 10 seconds or so. This is because old computers didn’t do much. The command prompt wasn’t a complex interface. There was essentially no software loaded other than a very basic OS, which existed only really to help you run software, one program at a time.
When we got to OSes with GUIs, multitasking, and more, we started loading every program and bit of functionality while booting up, but the hardware of the era was a lot slower – specifically hard disks.
These days, OSes have been optimized to only load necessary functions at first and then gradually load other applications and background processes.
The reason old “spinning rust” hard drives were so slow is because there would be a literal platter that spins, and if you wanted some data from it, a head would need to move and then it would need to wait for the platter to spin to the point where the data started. While there is no needle involved, imagine that a hard drive works more like a record player with a “smart” needle.
The most common HDD speeds were 5400RPM and 7200RPM. There were some 4000RPM drives and slower, and there were some 10k RPM drives too (loud and expensive!), but a normal midrange desktop PC would have a 5400RPM hard drive.
The data transfer rates of HDDs wasn’t bad for single continuous files, but for a lot of small files, the heads on the HDD would need to zip back and forth, while spending a lot of time waiting for the platter to spin around too. The data could become fragmented, too, where rather than one file being a continuous stream of data, it would need to be scattered over the whole drive in different places. This slowed down file transfers even more.
A common HDD performance benchmark was “access time” – how long it would take the hard drive to access the data when you request it. For a typical HDD, you might have an access time of approximately 12ms – that would be 0.012 seconds. That sounds extremely fast, right? Well, that equates to a maximum number of different tiny files to about 90 per second.
That sounds very fast in human terms, but in computer terms, it is glacially slow. If you’re booting up the computer, it accesses thousands of tiny files. If we abstract the full booting process to, say, access 4,000 tiny files, it would take that hard drive 44.4 seconds to get to them all.
SSDs are solid state – you’re not waiting on a platter to spin, so they work more or less at the speed of other electronic systems – they’re still an order of magnitude slower than RAM as the reading and particularly writing process is slower, but they are an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive, too. Not only that, many SSDs come with RAM on them to speed data transfers and such even more!
Whereas the HDD needs to operate sequentially and has to wait on a physical platter, the SSD waits for nothing. If the HDD manages 90 operations per second, the best case scenario for an SSD can look more like 200,000 operations per second. In reality this number will be lower a lot of the time – but even in an SSD “worst case” they can still often handle 15k + operations per second.
What took a HDD 45 seconds to do, the SSD can do in under 1 second. Of course, there are other factors that limit booting speed, so SSDs aren’t 45x faster to boot than HDD systems, but they are the biggest reason that new computers are so much faster. Likewise, with something like a cellphone, they generally don’t have the highest performance storage, but it’s still going to be a LOT quicker than a mechanical hard drive. The data transfer rates of these phones may well be similar to a modern hard drive – for one big file – but for things like booting phones up, loading software, and such, solid state will beat mechanical storage every time.
TL;DR: Old computers relied on mechanical spinning discs and a moving arm to write and read data which was significantly slower than modern storage options which are 100% electrical.
In depth answer:
The old computers used a physical hard drive that utilized spinning discs and an arm that had a magnet on the end like an old record player. The discs would spin and the arm would move in and out to read the data from them.
When these old computers are turned on you could hear the click of the discs starting to spin, the hum as their speed ramped up, and the little clicking sound of the arm jumping around between sectors on the discs.
The reason is because it was the only cost effective and reliable way to store a lot of information (for the time) when power was removed from the computer.
So all of the electrical components moved at the speed of electricity (near speed of light), but getting the windows operating system off of the hard drive required waiting for the arm to physically move into position and read the data off of the spinning discs. It could do it pretty fast for what it was and over time the RPM speeds of the drives increased lowering the loading times, but relative to pure electricity it was still slow.
What made things worse was if pieces of data weren’t right next to each other. The arm may need to jump to the inner ring, outer, inner, then mid to load one piece of software. This was called fragmenting. Microsoft actually developed a tool called de-fragmenting that would rearrange the data on the drive to keep related sectors next to each other. Running it could significantly increase your computers loading speed.
Modern computers have hard drives that are all electrical. No more physically moving parts, so everything can run as fast as the electricity can.
TLDR is we’ve reached peak OS functionality while the speed of technology continues to grow
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