Linonut wrote:
> * Roy Schestowitz peremptorily fired off this memo:
>> BIOS boots to Linux in one second
[...]
>> There are other such things, including SplashTop which takes just 5
>> seconds to boot.
>
> Big deal. My Atari ST was faster.
Faster than 5 seconds ... yes under ideal circumstances. Not faster than
1 second though. IIRC both the Atari ST and the Amiga A500 took a couple
of seconds to bootstrap (even without TOS/Workbench), since the hardware
still needed to be assigned resources, even though this was done in ROM
(mostly). The Amiga's autoconfig of Zorro resources was an especially
elegant (and fast) solution. Also the Atari had a rather long memory
test on each cold boot, although this could be bypassed:
http://jens-inge.dyndns.org/html/guide206/html/mem_test.htm
> Of course, it didn't have to:
>
> enumerate a device directory
The Amiga had DEVS:DosDrivers (this was mainly a form of automount).
I don't recall this adding significantly to the startup time though.
I have no idea what the TOS equivalent was, if any.
> set up networking
The Amiga (at least) had SANA-II. I'm sure the Atari had something
similar, although that may have been in later models.
> set up NFS
The Amiga had Envoy for file sharing. There was also a modicum of
security with MUFS, and the multi-user versions of custom filesystems
like AmiFileSafe.
> start dbus
The nearest equivalent to this on the Amiga was probably a combination
of commodities.library plus the Arexx Ports system. Again, I can't
comment about the Atari.
> start samba
See Envoy, above.
> start ssh
Alas the best one could hope for in those halcyon days was telnet :)
> start ntp
For those lucky enough to be endowed with a machine that actually had a
battery backed clock, accurately setting the time required a phone call
to a rather stiff sounding Englishwoman (in the UK, anyway).
> start rsync
Similarly "rsync" was a somewhat laborious affair involving the copy
command, much like Windows users still do today, assuming they can find
the command prompt, much less know what to do with it if they find it.
As a side note: KingCON was a rather nice replacement for the standard
CLI (or Shell as they called it). Not quite up to the standard of Bash,
but at least it had command completion and a history buffer.
> start mail
Well there were mail /clients/ of course (YAM remains one of mu all-time
favourites), but alas no mailer daemons that I'm aware of.
> start spamassassin
What's "spam"?
Another fine MICROS~1 INNOVA~1
> start ntp
Twice?
Damn ... two phone calls to the speaking clock. You're killing me.
> ...
With enough bits of hardware plugged in, both the Atari and the Amiga
could easily take a good 5 seconds to bootstrap. Add a TOS/Workbench
HDD, and you could be talking up to a whopping 10 seconds, or maybe 20
with a floppy.
Scary.
Ain't progress great?
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| 'When it comes to knowledge, "ownership" just doesn't make sense'
| ~ Cory Doctorow, The Guardian. http://tinyurl.com/22bgx8
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
03:06:40 up 82 days, 42 min, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
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