this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Sure, let’s compare a single user, 16 bit, text only OS, with Windows.

Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed.

Again, apples and oranges.

I/O drivers were stored as part of the ROM in both Apple and Commodore. That’s your ancient equivalent to BIOS and kernel. But they loaded essentially nothing, and didn’t need to handle a myriad of different devices and interfaces. The whole thing took a few kilobytes of storage, and obviously, wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t very specifically supported.

A modern Linux kernel would also boot in a couple seconds if we were to strip every single driver from it but the handful needed to handle a monitor, an input device, storage, etc. The moment you plugged in a mouse, it wouldn’t work, and without an UI or even an interpreter, it would be useless. And I can assure you, it is way faster to load zsh in a modern computer, than any BASIC interpreter on an Apple II.