I completely agree with this comment. I could have spent all day on my C64 without even having a game to play or knowing how to code beyond PRINT and GOTO. Hacking around on a computer back in the 80s made me feel like I was part of a secret club and that, at any moment, I was going to live out War Games or some such (especially once we had a modem). The possibilities seemed limitless!
One thing that modern computing has never been able to replicate is instant on. Literally press power button - thing is running. Nothing like having part of your memory address space mapped directly to ROM. No updates and no second chances!
I'd love to reinvent computing from scratch and fix this. There's no good reason it should take so (comparatively) long for modern PC's to boot. It's a symptom of all the complexity grafted on over the decades.
I think there are fundamental technological reasons as well. For example, even if you were willing to never update the OS, could you purchase a 1GB ROM chip for example? If using EEPROM, would the performance match RAM? Most people would not want to trade run time performance for improved boot time.
The thing is, there are far more trade-offs today than there were in the days of the C64. It is a worthwhile goal however, ideally computers should turn on instantly.
