Carlos E. R. wrote:
In the "dark ages" a technician had to load the boot code with a bank of swithces, instruction by instruction. Write a word, flip a switch to load, then the next word.
<offtopic> That is precisely why it is called "boot" - this code was the "bootstrap" code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping
Finally, another button to "run". Then the machine knew how to load things from something else (cards, tape, whatever). Apparently, they had no "bios" or no bios boot code.
That is correct. When I was in highschool in the late 70s, we had a 16bit minicomputer with three 80x25 terminals and a teletype with paperpunch. AFAIR, after a power failure, it had to be bootstrapped before it could load the COMAL or Fortran interpreters from 8" floppy. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (0.5°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - your free DNS host, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org