your pc should not be able to start up unless it has a smaller, dumber, but still fully complete pc to bootstrap it. for ages these were too expensive, but with the raspberry pi now available, it's time for a return to tradition. on friday i will delete all my boot records and my pc will become a brick on startup until i send it 40 bytes over a serial port that tell it what a hard drive is
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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:
I've got oscar vermeulen's pidp-8 emulator front panel over my desk and one of my favorite artifacts related to it is an 8gb flash drive (the cheapest one at the best buy that day) which contains only a 256-word paper tape that's a second stage bootloader to run an emulated PDP-8 tape drive
naturally the first-stage loader is silkscreened in octal on the front panel and you have to key it in by hand
the amount of cash money moolah i'd pay to have a life where I have a legitimate Business Need to regularly key things in on one of those heavy, sculpted-button PLA 10-key pads oops but it also has the hex letters
oh yeah the pidp-8 has scaled-down replicas of the switches from the original pdp-8 operator panel: https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8
absolutely gorgeous computer sicko stuff
I only got as close as having a Service Processor in my Sun and IBM servers. It's very satisfying to plug in a serial cable, logging into the pilot light computer, and telling it to turn on the big machine.