Not really Linux-related, but a quick thanks to Astute Reader No. 1, who sent along a great three-minute clip off of (gasp!) YouTube from a year ago or so, showing simultaneous boots on a Vista-laden PC from 2007 and an ancient floppy-driven Macintosh Classic from 1984.
Rationalize all you want, it’s still taking far longer for a vastly more powerful computer to get to a workable starting point than a lowly 16-bit floppy-driven machine.
This is the part where I usually insert a long and windy tirade about bloated software and inefficient programming and why it’s ridiculous to waste money on newer faster machines when obviously the old ones will work, if given a chance.
But I’ll spare you. You can use your imagination for that point, and even use a creaky old librarian lady voice if it makes things more amusing. 😆
P.S.: For goodness’ sake, don’t read the comments to that video. I don’t know what it is about YouTube that attracts the weakest minds on the planet, but. …
Motho ke motho ka botho 
A link to the video would be nice. I dont use any Flash player and cannot find the link.
One second please: Try this.
😀
Thanks dude. 🙂
That’s nothing, the Tandy 102 booted instantly and ran on AA batteries.
Hope you don’t mind me linking one of my own articles — it looks *slightly* better than the cyan-background original. . . http://mulenmar.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/chucks-tandy-102-a-retro-case-modding-experience/
I agree with you on the newer isn’t necessarily better. I just recently put Windoze 98se back on a couple of laptops. After seeing the boot and shutdown times, I really question if we have been advancing. All with less processor power and less memory. The Windoze software I need was written for 9x, so no losses there. I have come to prefer the penguin, but need the Windoze apps. It is only an OS, so I guess… what the hey.
My only concern with older hardware, is will it lay down on you when you are really counting on it? I guess, for what one can save in hardware costs, you pack two or more with you when going out on the road.
As you stated, give the old hardware a chance. It will usually more than do the job.
The only real limitation with both pre-OSX and win9x operating systems is that their memory systems were a bit of a problem. With pre-OSX, assuming my memory is correctly, there was no memory protection, so one application going sour could take down the whole system. With 9x, there was always the problem of low memory and extended memory rearing their heads from the dos days. My boot into a gui is about as fast as the floppy mac and I can do a lot more on my computer than the mac can do. Although that may be because I am running a customized install of Ubuntu Lucid built from the cli install up. 😉
My calculator boots up in less than a second. Such comparisons are simply not valid.
The good news is, that finally, the world noticed that nobody needs a quad core to read their e-mails and people are building relatively(!) slow netbooks that save you money instead of giving you performance you’ll never need.
Hahaha – the calculator comparison is the first thing that came to my mind too. My TI-89 & HP-49 boot virtually instantly & probably can outperform the mac too 😀
What NK said. There’s more to it than boot times.
Computers in 2007 can do way more than those old macs (I know as I used one in 1984 – yes I’m old ;o) ). Also Win7 is a quick-booter on my ddr3 hardware and Vista can be made to startup in ~30 seconds with (quite) a bit of tuning.