AFAIR you had to park the harddrive on most systems with such a device back in the day, so that wasn't universal. The Commodore 64 OTOH, was an instant off computer. ;)
Posted Jan 30, 2010 18:03 UTC (Sat) by SimonKagstrom (subscriber, #49801)
[Link]
Only if you weren't saving something to the tape!
Anyway, you can use halt -f to achieve the same thing you a Linux
computer. You can probably also bind it to the ACPI event when the power
button is pressed to get the desired behavior. The less brave among us would
do a sync first :-)