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>it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot f
by cstross 3y ago
>it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3).
This is not actually true: one other Mac could do this -- the Powerbook 100 could boot into System 6.0.8 (going by memory: I owned one).
The PB100 was the entry-level model of the original Powerbook launch range, and differed from the other Powerbooks, the 140 and 170. The latter were 68030 machines, but the PB100 ran on a 68000 and was designed by Sony -- it was physically smaller and lighter than the other two but used a weird lead acid battery that could run it for something like 40-50 minutes. Not sure why it booted MacOS 6 from ROM, but I suspect it might originally have been designed as a floppy-only machine to save battery power relative to the hard disk model they shipped.