alt Hacker Newshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw
In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.
Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
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There's a good article about this:
https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/
(previous discussion)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972
The Amiga feels fast because its slowness is predictable. Modern systems have unexpected slowness, and unexpected things are always more noticeable.
Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
Not surprising since this is a floppy-based system. An HD-based A3000 cold booted faster than most modern systems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-e3w7Hh9eU
Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.
To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!
This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.
The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.