From: Mitchell Yee (mitchell_yee_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Oct 18 2001 - 23:49:38 EDT
Ahhh, you're bringing me back to the good
old days at Stanford Research Inst. A
certain government agency gave us latitude
to spec out portable computers (this was the
mid-80s) that were rugged. We had Grid Computer
prototype us these very flat black portables
that booted into DOS and ran all of the
software from 64 KB eproms. One 64 KB eprom
held DOS. There was at least one
field accessible socket where you could drop
in an eprom that had something like Lotus 123
or Framework burned in.
It was very expensive. But the gov't agency
didn't want a ton, just enough, for certain
operations that required transportation by
parachutes.
Today, you could easily buy solid state cardbus
non-volatile memory cards. They're pretty
expensive.
Mitchell
--- "Steve C." <stevec50_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> There used to be non-volatile memory ISA cards for
> old
> PCAT's that you could boot from. They weren't
> anywhere near 1Gb however, maybe 32 or 64Kb. There
> were also some solid state "hard" disk replacements
> that were avalable for a while. Haven't heard of
> anyone making any for laptops, however.
>
> --- Jonathan Berry <jberry_at_islandnet.com> wrote:
> > Has anybody invented non-volatile memory (at a
> > reasonable
> > price) that you can boot from like a hard drive?
> >
> > Let's say something in the form factor of a hard
> > drive,
> > with 1 GB or more of storage? Instant-on, always
> > on, silent
> > turn your old 701 into a super palm computer...
> >
> > or more conventionally, a PCMCIA card that you can
> > boot from.
> > And a BIOS upgrade that would support it.
> >
> > --
> > cheers
> > Jonathan Berry
> > http://www.islandnet.com/~jberry/ to know
> more
> > than you want
> >
>
>
> =====
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