>You wouldn't need a thumb drive at all - the client is in the BIOS of the motherboard and network interface.
>Original idea dates from a time when mass storage - more than a few megabytes - was too expensive to install in each workstation, and we ran everything, including OS system files, on the file server.
To be fair, in those times most people had "bare" network cards and needed to add an Eprom to it to add the PXE extension.
BIOSes (and integrated network cards) with PXE booting capabilities came much later, when local storage (within limits) wasn't anymore that much expensive.
> To be fair, in those times most people had "bare" network cards and needed to add an Eprom to it to add the PXE extension.
I remember the days of plugging chips into NE2000 clones to put in diskless 386’s connected to a thinnet network. These machines netbooted DOS and the Novell Netware client from a 486-based server running Netware 3 using a proprietary, non-PXE boot process. Loads of fun.
(I still have a tray of boot ROMs somewhere. I wonder if that code has been preserved somewhere or if I should read them out...)
but there is a whole world of different Eprom sizes and the usual possibility of incompatibilities with the NIC or with the BIOS on those old machines:
>Original idea dates from a time when mass storage - more than a few megabytes - was too expensive to install in each workstation, and we ran everything, including OS system files, on the file server.
To be fair, in those times most people had "bare" network cards and needed to add an Eprom to it to add the PXE extension.
BIOSes (and integrated network cards) with PXE booting capabilities came much later, when local storage (within limits) wasn't anymore that much expensive.
But, yes, ... kids today ...