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….
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