1 Jan
2024
1 Jan
'24
5:37 a.m.
On 12/31/23 3:06 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
OpenFirmware is Mitch Bradley's baby. I believe
it ran on 68k Suns,
there was some sort of boot prom there. I mostly used it on SPARC.
It was developed for SPARC and never ran on Sun-3's.
The point of it was to be processor independent.
I was involved in bringing it up on Power Macs. It was
championed by Ron Hochsprung there, who is also a
FORTH fan.
In theory, you should have been able to use PCI expansion
cards at boot time across vendors by using it, but in practice that didn't
happen because very few vendors ever bothered to support
anything in their BIOS ROMs other than the PC.
And when Apple went with x86 they used the PC's way of the
world, like everyone else.