[crb]

I maintain that "booting a Mac, loading Chrome, loading Google Docs, and getting ready to type", takes as long as "booting DOS, starting Windows 3.1, loading Word for Windows 2.0", takes as long as "loading GEOS from floppy disk on a C64, loading geoWrite", and so on, and so forth.

[Joker_vD]

If anything, it probably got slightly slower over the years.

Reminds me of that time when we switched from writing by hand (and sometimes typing on a typewriter) all kinds of forms and reports to composing them on a computer and then printing it: initial time savings were pretty huge and so, naturally, the powers that be said "well, guess We can make you fill much more paperwork than you currently are filling" and did so. In the end, the amount of paperwork increased slightly out of proportion and we're now spending slightly more time on it than we used to. A sort of a law of conservation of effort, if you will.

[dspillett]

Try beat:

1. Power on BBC

2. Type *EDIT[ENTER]

Though obviously not as fully featured as a modern word processor, or even some editors of the time.

[tekkk]

No, c'mon. I still remember how it took ages for my old Windows to boot up and even get to the desktop. Maybe DOS was faster without GUI but it was god damn slow at one point. And all that weird noise your PC would make while reading from the disk non-withstanding the dance with the modem. With my current Mac I'd say it takes about 15s to open Docs.

[makeitdouble]

The interesting twist to me is that waking up a phone and opening the Google Docs app is the same time length or a tad faster.

We haven't progressed in speed, but versatility is theough the roof compared to 10 ~ 20 years ago.