> 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!
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.