the youtube algorithm works in strange ways
it was almost exactly 10 years ago when i uploaded a one minute and 35 second standard definition
video called the world's fastest booting pc and at the time they got a fair amount of interest
but as with the vast majority of my videos over time it faded into the background
and only got a handful of views and comments over the years since then
that was until about a week and a half ago when i started noticing that this video
from 10 years ago started getting more views and comments again
and since then it really has shot up in popularity in the past week it's gained almost 200,000 views
and i have no idea why there's no consistent theme in the comments as
to how people came across this video other than somehow youtube recommended it to them
and just like they did 10 years ago most of the comments on that video
have fallen into two distinct categories the first is people complaining about the high pitched wine
from the crt monitor i was using and the other group are people bragging that their commodore 64
boots up faster than the tandy 1000RL i showed in the video even though that's not actually correct
because if you go back to that original video i uploaded you'll see that this tandy takes
2.2 seconds between when i pushed the power button and when the dos prompt appeared on the screen
so here we go
and there we have the dos prompt
whereas you can go to any video showing a commodore 64 turning on and you'll see that
it takes about 3.4 seconds between when they flip the power switch and when the basic screen appears
and here we go this is it guys it powers up
it works!
however the days of this tandy 1000RL reigning supreme as the world's fastest booting pc
may be numbered because unlike 10 years ago i now have its successor the tandy 1000RLX
introduced in june 1991 the tandy 1000RLX kept the same low profile pizza box style case
at 25 watt fanless power supply as the 1000RL but upgraded it with a faster and more powerful
286 processor more ram higher resolution vga graphics a high density 1.44 megabyte
floppy drive and doubled the disk space when equipped with the optional
40 megabyte hard drive yes you still had to pay extra for the hard drive
and for the few people who did not order it with the optional hard
drive it still has the core system files of ms-dos 3.3 and tandy's deskmate graphical
user interface in rom which means we can do a direct comparison of boot up times
between the 1000RL that i featured in my original video and the 1000RLX to see if it's any faster
and if it is that would make it the even faster world's fastest booting pc
here are the two machines side by side with their covers taken off as you can see they look
nearly identical inside they both have the optional 40 megabyte seagate st-351a/x
ide-xt hard drive on both of these machines i'm going to leave it disconnected
so that these boot up from the built-in dos
in rom which is a lot faster than waiting for the hard drive to spin up and initialize
here is the motherboard of the 1000RL it has an AMD 8086 processor running at 9.54 megahertz
768k of ram one 8-bit isa expansion slot and tandy's improved cga graphics which provides
the full 16 colors in all modes compared to only four colors for standard ibm cga graphics
and also the tandy sound chip with three voices one noise channel and an 8-bit digital to analog
and analog to digital converter for recording and playing back digitized speech and music
and here is the motherboard of the 1000RLX it also has an AMD processor but this time it is a 286
running at 10 megahertz one megabyte of ram on board vga graphics of its own 256k of video ram
the same single 8-bit isa expansion slot and the same tandy sound capabilities as the 1000 rl
so here we go with the comparison as you can see i'm using crt monitors
with both of them because every lcd monitor no matter how good
has some degree of lag to it so i don't want that to be a factor in this comparison
so if the high pitched whine bothers you you can mute the audio and just look at the subtitles
both monitors are plugged directly into the wall outlet so i can turn them on
but both computers are plugged into a switched power strip so i'm going to turn on both of
them but you'll see the computers do not boot up until i flip the switch at
which time both computers will start up exactly simultaneously and we'll get to see on the video
which one of them reaches the dos prompt first if there's a difference at all between them
so here we go i'm gonna flip the switch three two one go
well that's pretty damn close i may need to do a
slow motion video to capture the exact difference between the two of them
from the slow motion footage you can see that even though it has a slower
and less powerful cpu the 1000RL booted up a split second faster
than the 1000RLX there's a couple possible explanations for that
first is that the 286 cpu that the RLX uses boots up in protected mode and it has to switch into
real mode in order to load dos and in order to do that on a 286 you have to actually reset the
cpu and then there's a special location in memory you put a special flag and that tells
it you're not actually resetting it you're just switching from protected mode back to real mode
and that doesn't take very long to do but on a system as slow as these every clock cycle counts
and i think more importantly this has vga graphics while this has an enhanced version of cga graphics
and the support free cga is built into the main system rom on the 1000RL whereas on the RLX
the support for vga is its own separate rom that needs to be loaded and initialized and
i think that's why you can see even before either of these computers start loading dos
even just the rom bios message takes longer to appear on the RLX compared to the RL
and also this has one megabyte of ram while this has only 768k of ram and neither of
these computers does a full diagnostic check of the ram when they're starting up
but they do need to count how much ram they have so because this has more ram
it's going to take a little bit longer to count it than the 1000RL and also there's almost no
difference in cpu clock speed between these two systems this one is running at 9.54 megahertz
and this one is running at 10 megahertz so that's less than a 5 difference
so all those things combined
can explain why the 1000RLX is actually slightly slower to load than the 1000RL
yes that's thunder outside if you can hear it but there's one more comparison
i want to make the deskmate graphical user interface that's built into rom
on these computers because maybe that's where the 286 power of the 1000RLX
will redeem itself so i'm going to exit out of deskmate on both of these
and type in desk on both of them
and i'll try to hit enter simultaneously on them so three two one go
no! the 1000RL is still slightly faster than the 1000RLX
now to be fair this has much higher resolution vga graphics so that could
be a lot of the explanation of why this takes longer to load than the 1000RL
but you could clearly see the difference there i didn't even need to do slow motion
so unless someone can prove otherwise this tandy 1000RL from 1990 still reigns supreme
as the world's fastest booting pc