It takes exactly 2.2 seconds for the DOS prompt to appear after turning on the Tandy 1000RL, a MHz 8086 XT-class computer with the startup files of MS-DOS 3.3 and DeskMate in ROM. Adding a hard drive actually slows down the startup process on the 1000RL, because it has to wait for the hard drive to spin up and initialize before it will boot.
Is this computer still the world’s fastest booting PC today, 10 years later, in 2021? Watch my new update and find out:
p.s. For comparison, the Tandy 1000SL/2 with an 8 MHz 8086 takes 2.6 seconds to boot to MS-DOS 3.3 in ROM, and the Commodore 64 (NTSC version) takes 3.4 seconds to boot to its BASIC in ROM.