Donnie’s Blog

Most people that work with computers know about Moore’s Law, which basically predicts that computing power will double every 18 months or so. (I don’t know why it’s called a law when it’s a prediction, but whatever!) Generally, you would imagine that this should mean that a particular computing task should take half the time to complete every 18 months, too.

But, there is one operation that seems to have remained constant over time, thumbing its nose at Moore’s Law, and that is booting up the computer. It seems like that always takes about a minute. It has from the days when I was playing with MS-DOS 3, all the way until now when I boot up Windows XP or the latest Linux. I think this is kind of counterintuitive. Hard disks are faster, memory is faster, and processors are faster, but still, somehow, it takes a whole minute for the computer to boot up.

You might say, “But there’s all these nifty new features built into operating systems nowadays! Like filesystem journaling, and automatic hardware discovery, and clock synchronization, and …” Yeah yeah, but still there’s got to be a reason why it takes about a minute, and not, say, ten minutes, to boot up. “You see, that would just be way too long for people to wait. But a minute is okay.” So, I think that there’s something “special” about getting the OS loaded in a minute or less.

As an aside, I have it on good authority that this is still going to be the case in the 24th century. You see, there was an episode of Star Trek TNG where the Enterprise’s memory got corrupted, and “Oh hey, we’ll just reboot the whole spaceship.” It took a whole hour for the geniuses to figure that one out. If Microsoft were still around then, that would have been the first thing they would have tried. They could’ve just hopped onto a subspace link to India and gotten some good tech support. The episode would probably still be an hour too, although not as exciting.

And how long do you think it took for the Enterprise to reboot?

About a minute.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.