Curt Sampson wrote:

> 
> > > I've not tested this out with anything but a Sun 3/60 with bios v1.6
> > > and v1.9 (no 3/50 to try it with),
> > 
> > Um, what's a "bios"?  AFAIK no Sun-3 has anything known as a bios (nor
> > BIOS); I thought the term was restricted to the intel-dos-box world.
> > I'm not entirely clear on what a dos-box BIOS does, but from what
> > little I do know, it sounds like a rudimentary OS in ROM, which I'm
> > fairly sure Sun-3s don't have, so there's not even anything very close.
> 
> Well, I'm sure he means the Sun-3 boot PROMs.

Which _is_ functionally equivalent to a BIOS.  AFAIK both NetBSD/sun3
and NetBSD/sparc use the PROM device drivers to boot, just like NetBSD/i386
uses the BIOS.  Perhaps a new term that means something like:
 ROM-code-that-is-used-to-talk-to-hardware-for-bootstrapping-my-machine

Then we'll have a MI term.

:)

-Andrew