Primates apart, the reason for exceptionally fast "boot" for ZX-Spectrum (and most of hobby/home/game-console computers from that time) was that software was stored in the ROM that CPU was able to execute directly from. Also hardware was much simpler and did not require arcane initialization for SDRAM [1] and such. So power-on initialization was literally something like "set stack pointer and few global variables; clear the screen; print prompt; done"

Nowadays, everything is on external media (external as in "outside of CPU's memory address space"), so executable code should be loaded into the RAM first (and likely assembled from 100s of DLLs or .so's in that process). And before that, you need to initialize at least 3 hardware components (SDRAM, mass storage controller and mass storage device itself; often this list is much longer).

That said, embedded systems booting in under 1 second were available 6 years ago [2]. Not many seem to be interested.

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/96831/sdram-i...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/andrewmurraympc/elce-the

> Also hardware was much simpler and did not require arcane initialization

That was exactly my point. Similar issues can affect brain development as well. For example, we have things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia

Nope, it wasn't literally that simple. The ZX Spectrum did a lot of RAM tests to determine if the RAM was faulty or not, and how much memory that was installed.

The price of ZX Spectrum was kept low by using low quality RAM.

No. You need to compare boot times with how quickly a primate acquires skills after birth. As TFA states, one-year old chimp kids are as good as three-year old human kids at numeric tasks. However, after that they don't get much better, whereas human kids do. Similarly, your ZX Spectrum in the end has less capabilities than a modern PC.

Roughly speaking, in the womb, our wetware is built. After birth, it is initialized.

Likewise, you can post instantly if you don't read TFA. Does that mean you're a better poster?

And you can downvote instantly if you don't think about what the comment is saying. Does that make you a better moderator?

I did read TFA before I posted. That's why I made a point in my post which is missing from TFA, IMHO. Specifically: more complex hardware/software (that can do more) can require more complex initialization, and it can be an engineering trade off that applies to computation systems in general.