I was confused about the 11-minute bootup--my old 486/66 running Slackware took maybe 3-4 minutes to boot in 1994--but then I watched the video: it's everything that we've added to Linux systems since 1994 that makes the startup slow. It's mostly post-kernel services and tasks that are slowing things down on this old PC. I wonder if he could speed things up further by removing some of the modern conveniences and going back to a basic system that didn't run much beyond inetd, getty, and crond.