9 May
1998
9 May
'98
4:09 a.m.
Joe <rigdonj(a)intellistar.net> wrote:
Not exactly, it has a built-in floppy drive that you
can boot from, or
you can use an external drive on the HP-IB. >BUT< they also had an
optional ROM that contained an entire HP-UX system. HP called it a
software engineering ROM. From what i've been told they're extremely rare.
HP also made another ROM that contained a complete HP Technical BASIC in it.
It doesn't boot from any kind of disks, as near as I can tell -- just
auto-mounts them and hooks them into the RAM-resident filesystem. And
it doesn't buffer writes, so it's safe to dismount stiffies with the
eject button.
And having looked at the HP-UX 5.x manuals, "entire HP-UX system"
means "that subset supported on the IPC". It's pretty cut-down but
usable in a single-user stand-alone non-networked (not even UUCP) PC
sort of way.
-Frank McConnell