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Dutch legend has been running his campsite since 1986 using an Atari ST:
If there's one thing YouTuber Viktor Bart likes, it's retro computers: his channel is dedicated to videos about building old machines, their functions, cool oddities, and just generally the joy of these beige things. Even Mr. Bart, however, was surprised by what he found in Koningsbosch, in the Dutch province of Limburg: a campsite that's been run since 1986 on an Atari ST.
[Ed note: Is there anybody here who has an Atari ST? Please share your experience in the comments.
I bought its predecessor, an Atari 800, in 1980. Even got an expansion cartridge to boost memory from the on-board 8 KB RAM. Yes, I spent countless hours playing Star Raiders. It was not as capable as the Atari ST, but it was a fun system that booted up instantly!]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday October 04 2021, @01:10AM (5 children)
Yeah, we took a giant step backwards in that department. Now we're back to the old days of waiting for the TV to warm up. I mean, really, software drivers? 600 megabytes to run a printer??
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 04 2021, @04:38AM (3 children)
When you can put your entire OS on an eprom or two it really does wonders for the loading speed, certainly compared to floppies or harddrives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @04:37PM (2 children)
The Amiga had a fully multi-tasking operating system in less than 880K. If you stripped it down to leave space on the floppy you could get it under 400K.
I put a 40MB GVP hard disk / memory unit on my A500. 1 meg chip ram + 8 meg fast ram and it went from power off at the wall to fully booted in 12 seconds. It is a beast of an A500. :) I might have to look into one of those raspberry PI video upscalers though, the 1084S is getting a bit fuzzy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday October 04 2021, @04:51PM (1 child)
Might I also suggest looking into building a PiStorm accelerator for the A500.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:54AM
Cool. You might have just determined my next project when I get some free time. I'll try it on a spare A500. (I have about five. People kept giving them to me when they downgraded to PCs. :) )
(Score: 3, Touché) by Marand on Monday October 04 2021, @02:01PM
Depends on your hardware and OS. I can get from GRUB to login in about 5s on a Ryzen laptop with NVME storage, which isn't *instant* but is close enough. It actually takes longer to get past the UEFI "bios" than it does to boot Debian, but only because it's intentionally delaying for user input. Also none of those insane printer driver packages Windows has, either.
It's taken decades but we finally got back to suitably fast boot times, assuming you don't use a toy OS whose only real value is playing PC games.