On Monday, 25 February 2002 at 18:05:17 -0800, John Nemeth wrote:
> On Jun 10,  6:07am, Rick Kelly wrote:
>> John Nemeth said:
>>
>>> out on BSD.  The first UNIX box I used was an old Pyramid with the dual
>>> universe OS, which was running with the BSD personality.  Then I used a
>>
>> Very bizarre machines. To boot you had to first boot from a floppy that
>> installed the "firmware" and started the monitor in memory, then you booted
>> the system from the monitor.
>
>      When I had a tour of the machine room at university, they opened a
> cabinet on the IBM 3083 mainframe and showed us a floppy drive.  They
> said the purpose of it was to load microcode for the processor.

This was the orignal purpose of floppies, loading microcode for the
/370 in the early 70s.

Greg
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