Null references (oh no, not again!)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"BCS" <ao at pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:78ccfa2d3b9ad8cb6c7444cdbb0a at news.digitalmars.com...
> Reply to Sean,
>
>> We had a couple of Wang Word Processors (I think) in our school that
>> used those, but I never got to touch one.  Only the PETs that used an
>> external audio cassette drive for data storage.  Probably took a full
>> 60 seconds to load a program from one of those things... not too
>> shabby for a whole 4k.
>>
>
> Computers now have literally orders (many orders) of magnitude more space 
> and power and the load times for real program haven't even improved by 
> even a single order of magnitude. :b
>

With video games it's actually been getting steadily worse. Atari VCS games 
could go from power-on to gamplay in mere milliseconds (at least, if you 
were quick enough with the "reset" button). On the NES, many games were just 
as fast, but some thrid party ones added a few seconds of unskippable 
"legaleze" upon boot (although it wasn't really a "technical" restriction at 
that point). But then disc-based systems came along and granted enormous 
storage, but at the price of noticably worse bootup and load times (ten or 
so seconds, if not more). Then many XBox1 games started caching stuff to the 
HDD before any actual gamplay, but that can sometimes take upwards of a few 
minutes (like in Splinter Cell 3 and 4). Now with the PS3, there are certain 
games that require an upfront installation of nearly half an hour.