April 04, 2005, 1:03 PM — The work day dawned with the scent of coffee and the blinking of a fluorescent tube. These mental ablutions in place, I turned on my computer like I do every day. Unlike every other day, a seventy year old relative of mine, watched the ceremony with considerable interest. He was clutching a prescription for some medicine. He wanted to know what the medicine was for.
'I know just the man to answer that question', I had said the night before.
'His name is Google. Let's ask him in the morning.'
So here we were. I switched on the CPU. I switch on the monitor. I waited. I sipped coffee. He sipped tea. We looked at the machine, listening to the various beeping and whirring noises.
'What's happening now?', he asked, peering over his glasses at me with both eyebrows fully extended.
'It's booting. Starting up.', I answered.
A pre-natal silence of two minutes elapsed before the machine was fully compos mentis and work could begin. I normally use these few minutes as think-time. Planning my next moves. I was silent.
'It takes a while to warm it up, doesn't it?'.
'Yes', I answered, 'Yes, it does.'
I felt a tinge of embarrassment at the delay. After all, we are surrounded by complex machines, many of them have computers inside them. You turn the ignition in your car. It 'boots' straight away. Hit the green button on the TV remote. It 'boots' straight away. Everything around us that is electrical in nature seems to boot instantaneously - except our computers.
For a certain class of computer of course, a leisurely boot sequence is just fine. Big Unix or AS/400 machines running in server farms for example. Who cares if they take 30 minutes to boot when booting is such a rare process? Once these machines get running, they will stay running for years on end, power-supply permitting.
For another class of computers, such as the laptop I am writing this article on, boot time is a real issue. I lug this thing into coffee shops, through airports, into hotel rooms. Given all the effort of carrying the thing around, is it too much to ask for it to boot quickly so that I can use it for impromptu note-taking, telephone number lookups, calculator functions etc.?
Things have improved somewhat in recent years with suspend-modes and so on but I cannot help feeling that getting rid of the 'warming up' process completely, requires a more radical innovation. Perhaps there is just too much disk-oriented baggage in the current crop of operating systems for instant-boot to be viable.
Perhaps a spot of lateral thinking is called for. Here is a thought. I know my laptop is capable of interactive work practically as soon as I hit the 'on' button. How so? Because as a PC clone, it has some battery powered storage that is accessible through a thing called a BIOS[1]. I can press the F3 key on my machine just after power-on and enter into the BIOS configuration area. Once there, I am effectively running a baby operating system, complete with video, keyboard and RAM-based storage.
Now imagine an expanded version of this mode of operation which has more functions and more RAM-based storage. It could be used for calculations, for note taking etc. I don't see any technical reason why this should not be possible.
Imagine for a moment, that some laptop manufacturer took this step. What do you think would happen next? My guess is that another laptop manufacturer would launch a machine with even more functionality in its baby-OS operating mode. That could create an interesting dynamic in which - potentially - an entirely new operating system substrate would be hatched under the hood of the main one.
Thinking out loud here...wouldn't it be interesting if the Baby-OS consisted of the network drivers from the main operating system plus a web browser? Firefox burned into ROM? I could do a lot of useful work with that setup. For work that lasts mere moments, where you cannot afford to waste entire minutes waiting for a boot sequence, it would be just ideal.
I am tired of warming up computers.
[1] http://www.sysopt.com/biosdef.html
