[grayhatter]

Do you believe that you can reason about a computer? I'm going to assume yes. If you'd rather your computer do the countable number of things you know it needs to do, before it draws to the display because it's faster. That's only because you know thoes things exist, and how long they should reasonably take. Most users can't count them, nor do they trust their computer. The loading screen does satisfy them because they know the computer hasn't randomly crapped out... *again*. People who don't understand how to fix computers don't trust them. Rightfully so, they generally dont do what their owner/users want, and randomly will just break costing more money, for seemingly no reason. Those loading screens prevent some of the anxiety of using something you need when you don't understand any part of it.

[smoldesu]

Today's laptops and the majority of desktops boot more than 10x faster than they did a decade ago, so for all but the youngest users I feel like this point is moot. There was an age where you had to go get a coffee while your hard drive started spinning up, I remember kids starting their Macbooks before they got in the car for school so they'd be booted by the time they were in class...

[bitwize]

When I was a kid, kids weren't issued MacBooks for class. There was a single, lone Apple II in the back we played Oregon Trail on -- and it took a fair few minutes to load from floppy.

[nl]

A floppy drive? Get off my lawn

On my C64 I'd start loading a game from cassette tape before dinner so I could play it afterwards.

[jamiek88]

Cassette? Pah!

I had to type the games source code in from a magazine for my acorn electron.

[noizejoy]

Cassette tape?

Punched tape[0]: Hold my beer

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape

[nl]

I don't think punched tape or punched card was ever used for a personal computer though.

The Altair launched with a cassette tape interface anyway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

[noizejoy]

Fair enough, but would it be fair to argue that personal computer is a pricing distinction, rather than a technology distinction?

In my mental model, the technology distinction is more between single user and multi-user systems. And arguably that is more a a software differentiator than a hardware difference.

[gzer0]

Floppy drive?

On my 9 track tape I would be lucky if the thing loaded and was ready to use 72 hours later [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape

[rusk]

I … think I agree with you …