A microchip which can store information like a hard drive has been unveiled by US company Freescale... "This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade," said Will Strauss, an analyst with research firm Forward Concepts... Mram chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.What, you mean like my Acorn Electron did QUARTER OF A CENTURY ago?
And this is An OS that loads from chips, written , and concerning Rants
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Paul Nolan
Drew
Ah, those were the days. I remember upgrading three labs of Acorn A3000 computers from RISC OS2 to RISC OS3. I think it came on two chips, and start to finish took about 3 minutes per machine.
Plus we made a nice sign for the wall using all the left over OS 2 chips.
sil
I liked the RISC OS. I even liked the minimal OS you had on the BBCs. Wish it wasn't proprietary, and I wish it had kept up...
barbobot
people are smrt!
Paul Nolan
Err Aq... it IS still going (when Acorn went under RISC OS Ltd. formed to carry it on. (I've got a post-Acorn RISC OS box under my desk)
sil
ah, I didn't say that I wished it was still going. I said I wished it had kept up...
Paul Nolan
Fair 'nuff (for some reason I mentally inserted an 'it' between 'kept' and 'up' :)
as days pass by » Putting the OS in ROM
[...] A few days ago I noted that an Acorn Electron booted from ROM which was fast, and that someone seemed to have rediscovered the technique. Is there any reason why someone couldn’t build a computer with Linux in ROM rather than on disc, so it booted really really quickly? You’d need some kind of flash memory thing so you could update it with new kernels or something, I accept, but would it work? I don’t know enough about the kernel and surrounding low-level OS stuff to know whether too much of it needs to be writable while it’s working. [...]
Acorn's are still doing that, too..