Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
downtowndougbrown.com
downtowndougbrown.com
In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that point in the form of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux system on every USB drive you own.
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_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 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.
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).
The recovery capabilities you mention have existed before EFI:
> Splashtop can work with a 512 MB flash memory embedded on the PC motherboard.
Not really a regular bios chip though :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378500
It never was true. I own one of the things.
Almost all 1980s computers booted the OS from floppy. If they had a hard disk at all, then if you trashed the OS on the hard disk, you could reinstall from floppy.
This was true of Amigas, Unix machines, Commodore 900 series, and all IBM PC-compatibles whatever they were running: PC DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Windows, OS/2.
You can't boot an Amiga into a full usable OS without at least 1 floppy disk, which means a floppy drive to read that disk.
Same for any PC compatible. Same for any Unix machine.
The point being that you could boot an Acorn RISC OS computer into the full unrestricted multitasking GUI, with networking, without any disks. Without even having a floppy drive, or a hard disk, or _any disk drives of any kind_. You could physically remove the drives and configure the machine to know it had none fitted, and it would boot and run apps from its built-in ROM drive.
You can do that on an Atari ST as well, with a lot of errors you need to cancel, but there was no multitasking and no network access so the result could not do much. No way to load apps, no way to attach to a machine to load any.
On an Acorn Archimedes with no drives, you could boot, run the text editor, write a letter, open the paint or line-art apps, draw pictures, open the music editor, write a tune, save all those files onto a fileserver, print them out, and then cleanly shut down.
No hard disk. No floppies. No floppy drive. Entire OS and GUI and core apps, in ROM.
In that era, virus made all your floppies bootable for you.
The numpad keys do have their own scan codes separate from that of the main rows.
The files still had to be in the correct sectors. Hence the use of the SYS command to perform this.
I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.
I'd love to use OS9 in UTM daily, but it's really just a tech demo.
That's called a visual affordance. Once upon a time it was canon that interactive UI items had visual affordance -- you could tell that you could interact with them at a glance, just by looking at them.
I also use that filter on iOS to tone down the colours by setting the Intensity of the same filter at a much lower level - I find the standard colours really garish when I turn them back on (e.g. when looking at photos). On iOS you can set a three-click shortcut on the action button to turn that on and off.
Edit: I forgot, there's also an "Increase contrast" setting there which makes the UI even closer to the older MacOS look, but although it does give different areas more differentiation I find it a bit too harsh - I think because it's just flat black and white, whereas the older systems used more greyscale textures.
Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor Peripherals Inc. I've had them fail on many occasions—they'd fail if so much as to look at them.
I recall one instance where I'd spent hours setting up my computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was the OS chucked an 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' message. Drive was completely dead.
Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's essentially what happened to the others—about a dozen or so. They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.) BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape streamers for backups.
Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB. If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was only 40MB.
Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by way of a data recovery service or such?
Also: the drive was absolutely dead, it wouldn't power up. I even tried to change its controller - I took it off another Conner drive, installed it on the deceased one - and nothing happened. On that occasion I realized that, even though they were the same model/capacity, Conner had used different electronics for different batches.
Ironically, the drive was built like a tank: never again I saw a hard-drive with a casing that thick (looked like cast iron).
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Conner_Peripherals
You might be thinking of Terminator ...?
Right, perhaps the name ought to be Data Terminator. :-)
The reason it was supposed to be more protective was that the industry expected everybody to buy a separate caddy for each CD-ROM they owned, so each CD would only ever be transferred once, and thus be scratched less. But caddies were expensive so obviously nobody ever did that (I'm not sure it even ever occurred to most people), and manufacturers quickly switched to trays.
There have been some amazing finds that way, especially game prototypes. Often, the data has been marked deleted and every time the system is used, it's more likely to be overwritten.
It's also a good idea because old drives could stop working at any time, and unless someone else has shared an image from the same device, there may not be a good way to use it again without copying that drive image to a newer replacement.
It was actually before my time (but not by much).