Re: PRODOS in ROM chip; boot from ROM

["Rick Kerman" <rkerman@mail.bright.net>]

stephen e buggie <buggie@musca.unm.edu> wrote in article
<5kga8d$ejo@lynx.unm.edu>...

> I am setting up a Mac SE/30 to connect to the college Ethernet.  I need 
> to do it this way because I get locked out of e-mail at every college 
> vacation interval because at present, all e-mail is via pee cee klones in

> a college classroom.
> 
> A technician told me that the Mac launches its desktop from a system 
> stored in ROMs; it does not need disk access or hard drive access.

Those first 2 paragraphs puzzled me, since the rest of the message talks
about ProDOS 8, which is 6502 code and can't be expected to run on a
Mac (unless you have some kind of emulator).  I will assume they are
only marginally related and respond to the rest.

> PRODOS IIe/IIc is only about 35K or 35 blocks; this could easily fit on a

> ROM.
> 
> Since there are no more recent Prodos-8 versions other than v.2.0.3, 
> could Prodos be placed on a ROm for super-fast booting???
> 
> If yes, then how???

You're not the first to have that idea.  There used to be a card available
for the ][+ or //e called the QuickLoader, which accepted up to 8 512Kbit
EPROMs.  A few software companies even made their programs available on
ROM.  An operating system on one of the EPROMs would download chunks of
code in Binary, AppleSoft, or Integer to RAM and execute them.  The latest
version of ProDos that I've actually put on ROM was 1.3, if memory serves.
It's been years since I've played with it, but I seem to recall that it
didn't need any disk devices at all, but ProDos did an "online" call as a
matter of course to find out what volumes, if any, were available.

Rick Kerman <rkerman@mail.bright.net>