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by sharikous 1464 days ago
Older Macs had a tight hardware-software integration, to the point of fuzzying RAM/ROM/HD/PRAM and System/firmware boundaries. User level routines where stored in the ROM, for example, and there was no real kernel to speak about.

I think Apple is coming back to that vey confusing model now with M1 macs needing their internal SSD to boot (effectively a part of the firmware) but a million times more complicated because of sheer code size and a giant security model
1 comments
kalleboo 1464 days ago
Yeah it was crazy, at one point in the mid-90's, they even had QuickTime burned into the ROM!

Eventually RAM was faster than ROM and starting with the first iMac they moved to having the classic MacOS ROM in a file that got loaded into RAM on boot.

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icedchai 1463 days ago
This was common with 80's - 90's computers. Amiga did this with Kickstart, Atari with TOS.
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