Null references (oh no, not again!)

[Georg Wrede]

BCS wrote:
> 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

You're joking, right?

They've got worse, by orders of magnitude. A 5 second boot with the 
Kaypro, versus (don't even know how long) for Vista on an average 
computer. Or firing up OpenOffice. (I've got a quad-core screamer now 
that I got fed up with using only old hardware, and OO still is slow to 
start.)

My VIC-20 booted up in less than 2 seconds.

----

Ok, they're trying. Windows-7 boots up a lot faster than Vista. And 
Fedora-10 much faster than my Ubuntu or an older Fedora. And Fedora has 
promised the next release to "really boot fast". But still...

With Windows 3.3 on a crappy 386 with a slow hard disk, Excel and Word 
were on almost as soon as you double clicked the icon.

If one wants truly Blazing Speed, get Wine and install W95 on it with 
Office-95. And for compilation and programming, Borland Pascal from the 
same era.