[Apple3-L] Can an Apple III Boot off an Apple Profile HD?

[Shirl]

Steve <steve at yuhasz.org> on Mon, Oct 1, 2007, 6:54 PM wrote:

> Thanks for the info. Very intriguing. From a historical standpoint, I
> find it incredibly interesting that the predecessors to the ///, the
> II/+, can boot off of hard drives, but yet the very expensive ///
> could not do this. What was Apple thinking? Yet another item to add
> to the list of undermining the success of this machine-especially
> considering how expensive it was at the time.

If I were Apple I would have had at least plans to support booting from
non-floppy devices. But given the short life of the /// I suspect such plans
(if they existed) would never have been given the resources to turn them
into reality.

>From a progamming perspective, writing a device driver to boot from say the
Apple ProFile hard drive would not be difficult. The boot driver could be in
the /// ROM itself, or in a ROM on a peripheral card which the boot ROM
would detect a la the Apple II periphal boot scheme.

- David Craig