[082349872349872]

I once read about an OS that booted before the floppy had fully spun up, and was inspired, only to discover when I tried it myself that at computer speeds, even with the floppy seek to load a kernel from a FAT image, it's actually rather easy.

(to be fair, I think media corruption was more common back then, so boot-time file system checks and other sanity checks may have been what kept mainstream boots slower?)

[flohofwoe]

Loading speed for cassette tapes and floppy disks was measured in bits per second at the time (usually between a few hundred to a few thousand bps), that was just what the hardware could handle, even without expensive error correction ;)

[zozbot234]

Makes a lot of sense, too. Why would you even want to load data faster than you can read it on screen, or print it out on paper? That's just a waste for such a minor increase in overall speed.