My favourite boot-loader story was told to me by one of the old-hands on the Jindalee Radar, when it was still a research project. Jindalee had a manned receiver station and a remote transmitter station, about 100km away. They were connected via a radio link, and to start with, the PDP at the remote site had to be booted by keying in the boot-loader over the radio link. If you lost the radio link, you had to start again...and again... and again...