My desktop cold boots in well under 30 seconds which is fater than say Apple Lisa which took over 1min to boot and showed a blank screen for a good 30 seconds. You can find videos on YouTube of various boot sequences. Worst case I can recall was a windows 95 machine which took 15 min to boot.
I think my new desktop does about the same thanks to the magic of SSDs. But a minute ain't bad for a boot. I remember some old servers I used to work on that would take 30 or 40 minutes to boot, most of which was spent waiting while the SCSI controllers did some kind of check out.
Before I replaced my old desktop, I think my boot times were something on the order of 10 minutes.
(and I don't count Windows claiming you can start to work while it loads a bunch of stuff in the background making the system unusably slow as counting).
