Subj : Re: Modern instant-on systems
To   : Daniel
From : Tom Lake
Date : Tue Apr 21 2020 09:56 am

On Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 4:15:02 AM UTC-4, Daniel wrote:
> Before saying anything, I want to point out that there is no pretense
> of expertise in this subject. I'm just a curious bean. As the growth
> of retro computing matures, projects to resurrect the platforms by
> building vice boxes gets more common. The C64-mini, the zx spectrum,
> sega.. Otherwise, the 8-bit guy is taking off-the-shelf components to
> build himself a modern juiced up Vic20 to sell at some point beyond
> vaporware. They're creating the basic interpreter and kernal for their
> system. All's well and good. This brought me to an interesting thought
> with a similar notion. What stops anyone from doing the same thing
> with a modern cpu and memory/bus system? Is it the complexity of the
> modern cpu? In retro systems, the developer controlled memory 
> allocation such. I'd assume the difficult part would be to micromanage
> every bit of memory management on a complex system. Am I on the right
> track?
> 
> I only ask these questions just to get a better understanding of it
> all. My daily laptop is a TRS-80 M200 laptop and, unlike any other
> system in the house, it's instant-on. It's ready to dance a moment
> after depressing the power button.
> 
> It would be utterly BOSS if a modern system could be created in the
> same tact. Could someone enlighten me?
> 
> ... Visit me at: gopher://gcpp.world

You can get almost instant-on by turning on a fast boot switch which is available in most BIOS. Fast boot eliminates a lot of the checking (such as a RAM test) the regular boot does. Remember, for the old systems, the ROM was written for just that 
particular hardware. There was no need to try to identify all sorts of different hard drives, USB devices, etc. The ROM knew exactly what was there and only needed to start BASIC or an rudimentary menu. Modern systems then have to load a very complex OS 
from some device. When everything is in ROM, there's no need to do that.

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