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by kjs3 532 days ago
Fully ROM/Flash PC-ish systems are/were pretty common in the embedded and industrial control space. Usually the boards emulate one or more floppy drives. I've got a half dozen variations, including PROM, Flash and battery backed SRAM. Even one with bubble memory, which is pretty nifty.

The first-gen PIX you mention had an 8M or 16M ISA flash card it booted from, containing the whole OS.

The Novell netboot is called "RPL".