256 kilobyte of the RAM used as ROM, did not drive cost significantly IMHO. Such a large ROM would also have been expensive. It was entirely a practical matter

256 kilobyte of the RAM used as ROM, did not drive cost significantly IMHO. Such a large ROM would also have been expensive. It was entirely a practical matter - the OS was pretty buggy and Commodore knew it. It was smarter to distribute the firmware/OS on magnetic media vs burning it in forever. The hard drive story may have been weird, but it was very flexible. You could in theory design completely new storage hardware today and hook it up to an old Amiga, and the operating system would be just fine because the drivers can be loaded from the device itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig