How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
> How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
Every Acorn Archimedes computer, since the entire OS (not just a rescue system, a full, graphical OS) booted in a couple of seconds entirely from ROM. It's the only computer I know of with a fully featured graphical OS that was fully functional without any kind of disk.
I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look at the source.
The closest I saw to this was my Dads Tandy laptop in late 80s that had no hard drive - the OS (DOS) was ROM and the file system was RAM, you could boot up with no discs inserted. In retrospect it was a great computer for me to learn on since I could poke around freely and there was no chance of bricking it.
I remember a thing called menuetos, written mostly in assembly and fitting a single floppy drive while still having a decent ui and some drivers. You could probably fit that in a normal bios chip and/or boot it as a efi payload.
Imo it’s mostly about nobody having tried that yet (at least afaik).
I’ve been waiting for someone to do something more interesting with EFI. It’s extremely capable and could easily host a minimal recovery environment that would be invaluable in many situations, particularly on laptops which might be out in the field away from recovery tools when things break.
No. The equivalent to firmware was in ROM in later models, but the OS was loaded from disk.
It was unusually complete firmware, comparable to the Mac Toolbox, but you could not use the computer in any way without an OS that had to be soft-loaded.
The Archimedes was a full multitasking GUI OS, in ROM. No disk of any form needed. It could join a network and load apps and save files to a server with no local storage media even installed in the workstation.
This is why Oracle used it as the basis for the original network computer:
The Pace company, better known for modems and set-top boxes, ended up owning a fork of RISC OS for this purpose. That fork is what led to the current fully-32-bit version and then, later, to the FOSS release.
The Amiga 1000 (that came before the 500) didn't have the "kickstart" in ROM, so you needed a kickstart disk for the 1000.
The Amiga 500 and later had the kickstart in ROM and many of us would mod our Amiga 500 so that we could use a switch to select between kickstart 1.2 or 1.3.
But even on the Amiga 500, that still wasn't a UI from ROM: you had to use the "workbench" disk to get the UI.
Not from the very beginning. The earliest live boot CD I remember is "DemoLinux". Back then that was still a major hack. Now Fedora, at least, boots into live mode to run the installer from the full GUI.
Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux supported running off the CD as far back as 1993, but you needed a boot floppy because computers couldn't boot from CD at that point. When you installed it to your hard drive, most of the included software stayed on the CD, meaning that you had ~500 MB of software and source code permanently available without taking up hard drive space. This was useful in an era when 200 MB and smaller hard drives were common. After installing, you could pick and choose which system components you wanted to move from the CD to the hard drive.
Ah you mean the OS is in the ROM, soldered to the motherboard, maybe not even writeable. Sure, I don't know about that, maybe your example is the only one
Booting from ROM was pretty common back in the day. A lot of machines from the "golden age of micros" (late 1970s - early 1980s) would boot right up into a BASIC prompt. A full graphical interface was something else though! That's really cool!
> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that point in the form of
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux system on every USB drive you own.
Why in the world am I getting downvoted for this? For the Claude summary? I also checked the repository manually, and agree with the summary. One of the prime use cases for LLMs is summarization.
It would be extremely cool if this weren't the case, but current LLMs are just very bad at summarization. As evidenced by the slop you posted being a bad summary!
Yeah the first thing I did after a fresh windows install was to create boot disk, and have 2-3 copies just in case because floppy disks were notoriously unreliable.
Oh wow yes, you made me remember I didn't much like that. Money was tight as a teenager and it always hurt a little to "spend" floppy disks on multiple copies.
A little bit earlier, but I remember dumpster diving behind a big company in the early 80's and finding a couple boxes of probably about 200 blank floppies. Couldn't believe my score! I pretty quickly found out about half of them were bad, which was probably why they were in the dumpster. But still there were plenty of discs for Apple II games copied from all my friends.
Coming back to the parent claim. You could never trash the Amiga OS because as long as you had workbenchs disks you could reboot the OS just fine and the ROMs were always safe.
Almost all 1980s computers booted the OS from floppy. If they had a hard disk at all, then if you trashed the OS on the hard disk, you could reinstall from floppy.
This was true of Amigas, Unix machines, Commodore 900 series, and all IBM PC-compatibles whatever they were running: PC DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Windows, OS/2.
You can't boot an Amiga into a full usable OS without at least 1 floppy disk, which means a floppy drive to read that disk.
Same for any PC compatible. Same for any Unix machine.
The point being that you could boot an Acorn RISC OS computer into the full unrestricted multitasking GUI, with networking, without any disks. Without even
having a floppy drive, or a hard disk, or _any disk drives of any kind_. You could physically remove the drives and configure the machine to know it had none fitted, and it would boot and run apps from its built-in ROM drive.
You can do that on an Atari ST as well, with a lot of errors you need to cancel, but there was no multitasking and no network access so the result could not do much. No way to load apps, no way to attach to a machine to load any.
On an Acorn Archimedes with no drives, you could boot, run the text editor, write a letter, open the paint or line-art apps, draw pictures, open the music editor, write a tune, save all those files onto a fileserver, print them out, and then cleanly shut down.
No hard disk. No floppies. No floppy drive. Entire OS and GUI and core apps, in ROM.
How many computers in 2025 allow you to use your external USB keyboard numpad as arrows? Not an Apple, at least not without convoluted system-level configurations or third-party software. Apple gets many things right but can still be infuriating on the simple stuff.
Why would you expect it to do that? There is nothing on the keys to suggest they should have that feature and the actual arrow keys are about 5cm away.
Not sure how it is in Mac world, but in PC world the numeric keys have arrows (8 is up, 2 is down, 4 left, 6 right), and you can activate them by pressing NumLock. It has been this way since at least 90s. Never used them myself, but I guess if you are used to them and they no longer work it can be infuriating. E.g. like VSCode removing Insert key functionality (always inserts, never overrides the text).
There are no arrow on the numeric island an Apple keyboard, nor is there a numlock key. There is a 'clear' key on the numeric island in the location where a PC would have a numlock key (it has the function of the 'AC' key on a calculator and functions as such in the calculator app).
I am typing this on a 1987 Apple keyboard on a PC and this numpad functionality works. What I don't know is, is it because of Windows, or because of the ADB to USB adapter?
The numpad keys do have their own scan codes separate from that of the main rows.
Back in 1987, Apple sold a PC compatibility card, and the Extended Keyboard was designed to work with that. So I assume it always sent the correct scan codes.
In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.