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Comment by timcobb

2 days ago

I don't even think my Pentium 166 took 5 minutes to POST. Did computers ever take that long to POST??

Look at enterprise servers.

Competing POST in under 2 minutes is not guaranteed.

Especially the 4 socket beasts with lots of DIMMs.

Old machines probably didn't, no, but I have absolutely seen machines (Enterprise™ Servers) that took longer than that to get to the bootloader. IIRC it was mostly a combination of hardware RAID controllers and RAM... something. Testing?

  • It takes awhile to enumerate a couple TB worth of RAM dimms and 20+ disks.

    • Yeah, it was somewhat understandable. I also suspect the firmware was... let's say underoptimized, but I agree that the task is truly not trivial.

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Physical servers do. It's always astounding to me how long it takes to initialise all that hardware.