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It’s pretty interesting how Amiga and Atari ST followed Macintosh down a bad path of having large amounts of the OS in ROM, which may have made some sense when
by eschaton 2y ago
It’s pretty interesting how Amiga and Atari ST followed Macintosh down a bad path of having large amounts of the OS in ROM, which may have made some sense when a single few-hundred-kilobyte floppy was the only storage most users would have, but made a lot less sense just a few years later when the ROM OS needed lots of patches and everyone had some sort of fixed disk to boot from.
- icedchai 2y agoThe original Amiga 1000 had a 2 disk boot sequence. First was the Kickstart disk (which later was in ROM), then the next disk was the OS / app ("Workbench") I think the early STs did something similar.
- eschaton 2y agoYeah, Amiga 1000 only had a bootstrap ROM, which is what led to having a Kickstart ROM with part of the OS in it—same with the original Atari 260ST/520ST. Apple’s Lisa also had only a bootstrap ROM, which is why it originally had two Twiggy drives and everyone got a hard disk. Macintosh made the decision to put the OS in ROM to save disk space and make a single-floppy 128KB RAM system livable, but that only lasted a few months since the OS needed fixes and issuing new ROMs is expensive. Nonetheless Amiga and Atari ST did the same thing, and kept pursuing it far beyond when it was a reasonable trade-off just like Apple—who only went back to a bootstrap ROM with the “New World” systems in the very late 1990s.
- icedchai 1y agoThe early models of the A3000 also did something similar, shipping with a "beta" Kickstart ROM that was only used to load the actual Kickstart OS ROM file off of the hard drive. You could switch between 1.3 and 2.x ROM versions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]