Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!sunic!kth.se!draken!ianf
From: ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Re:  Booting MINIX from a 720K 3.5 floppy
Message-ID: <3169@draken.nada.kth.se>
Date: 19 Mar 90 17:22:35 GMT
References: <18573@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 21

In article <18573@boulder.Colorado.EDU> Andy Tanenbaum <ast@cs.vu.nl> writes:
> Utility programs in a ROM?  Good grief.  I suppose it has something to do
> with not having a hard disk.  Probably you would want sync, mount, ls,
> sh, cat, cp, login, mv, mkdir, rm, rmdir and su I guess.
>
> Andy Tanenbaum

  Actually it has more to do with not having to listen to
  an ever-spinning, noisy, harddisk.... or as little as possible,
  anyway.  There are but 2 laptops on the market that are equipped
  with a self-spinning-down harddrives: the Compaq SLT and the Apple
  Portable -- unfortunately they're both very expensive and the second
  one is rather of a "transportable" school.

  The rationale for putting as much as possible of the utilities,
  along with Minix kernel, in a ROM is also that they rarely ever
  change.... so why bother with a harddisk, if one could boot and
  run a number of programs from a no-delay ROM?

--Ian Feldman / ianf@nada.kth.se  ||  uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf / The "I had the
        bug narrowed down to a subrutine and then I lost all interest" hacker