I remember computers used to take sooo long to start up, that you can press the power button and go make yourself a sandwich. What changed? Hardware got faster obviously, but software also got more complicated and there are more of them to load up no?
In: Technology
Think about making a big, fancy sandwich with a lot of ingredients. Imagine making it in two different kinds of kitchen.
First, imagine making it in a very small kitchen without a lot of tools. You might only be able to get 1 or 2 ingredients out of a fridge at a time, and if you need multiple cooked ingredients like grilled onions or meat you might have to prepare one thing, stop to clean the pan, then prepare the next if you only have one burner. It will take you a very long time to make a fancy sandwich, but it’s possible.
Now imagine you have a very large, professional kitchen. There are multiple stoves, multiple ovens, and tons of countertop space. You can put all the ingredients in an easy place to reach them. You can toast bread, caramelize onions, and grill meat simultaneously. You can make a *better* fancy sandwich faster.
That’s what happened to computers. A long time ago, computers were so limited in what they could do the entire OS couldn’t really fit into memory. So at startup, part would load, it would do some setup tasks, then it’d load more parts, and at some point it’d have to shove some of that work off to a disk to make more room in memory for more stuff. This was very complicated and wasted a lot of time, but computers simply didn’t have the power or space to do better. Today, many people have computers that have more space than they need. So everything can go into memory right at startup and the OS can do all its setup work without swapping things in and out of memory. That’s a lot faster.
The people writing the OSes also streamlined everything too. In the 80s, they’d only had a couple of decades of experience building these systems. By now they’ve had 50+ years to improve upon their techniques.
Latest Answers