Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!abcfd20.larc.nasa.gov!lll-winken!unixhub!shelby!neon!pescadero.Stanford.EDU!philip
From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: ROM Disk
Message-ID: <1990Nov23.201949.18096@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 23 Nov 90 20:19:49 GMT
References: <1990Oct30.231717.29002@hoss.unl.edu> <1990Nov22.050513.6184@CAM.ORG> <40071@ut-emx.uucp> <9780@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 28

In article <9780@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, wilkins@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Mark Wilkins) writes:
|> In article <40071@ut-emx.uucp> james968@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (James Hammett) writes:
|> >In the afternoon our service came by and made another comment about using the
|> >Classic as a diskless Appletalk workstation.  It does save startup info on 
|> >mounting servers (including the user ID and password).   That may be one of the
|> >possible uses of the ROM disk.
|> 
|> 
|>   Someone asked some time ago whether any other machines had the potential
|> of booting across a net.  Well, the Mac LC developer notes indicated that it
|> did, although I'm not sure whether it's implemented the same way.
|> 
|>   Thus, this kind of thing may be real common in current Macs.  I'm pretty
|> excited about AppleShare 3.0 myself...

There are many situations where a totally diskless Mac could be useful
(example - the Macs are user interface front-end to a database system with
sensitive data, and you would rather not make it easy for someone to run
an abritrary program on the Mac).

If the Classic (maybe the LC?) can boot from a server, great - but what about
earlier Macs? Surely, rather than a complete system in ROM, all that is needed
is some subset of AppleTalk / AFP sufficient to find the server and load
startup code. Maybe it would not be too difficult a project for someone to
make a hardware add-on for older Macs to do just this.
-- 
Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu