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
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.
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