Finally, Death of the 3.5 inch floppy disk

Yup, pretty much, a batch file :-)

DOS is so remarkably fast. No grding on hard drives, no wait, it's instant.

That can create problems in the truly general case. Think about it: you are loading drivers for an HBA and want to get them from a CD-ROM, potentially attached to that very same HBA...

That would seem the most natural PC way of doing things. I'm not really familiar with the Windows boot process anymore but there has to be _some_ point early on where the BIOS is still readily accessible and kernel modules can easily be loaded.

Of course the most elegant way would be to place basic get-you-home drivers on the device itself. Sun managed this twenty years ago with their OpenPROM system, and that didn't even depend on the CPU since they were written in architecture-independent Forth. However that probably requires the kind of centralised planning and authoritative "this is the way it is going to be done" assertion that is difficult to enforce for commodity x86 hardware. The only time I can see you doing it is with a new bus standard: if e.g. PCIe had demanded it manufacturers would have little wriggle room.

That was originally the intention with the IBM PC, e.g. the video card has its own Flash or (EPROM in the old days). Unfortunately it works in real mode only, and standardization for the software interfaces appears to have stopped around 1988. The elderly among us probably still remember Ralf Browns interrupt list.

I still have it on my server. The windows version (help file) even. But resent the word "elderly" :-)

Meindert

OK geriatric

Legacy

There is a way to merge drivers ioto a windows install CD image, ( obviously this required writing a new CDR) AIUI microsoft calls it "slipstream"

I think ACPI is something like that.

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