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
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.
Latest Answers