A self-booting disk is a floppy disk for

home A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or many humans, and sometimes various companion animals. It is a fully or semi sheltered space and can have both interior and exterior aspects to it. H ...

or personal computers that loads directly into a standalone application when the system is turned on, bypassing the operating system. This was common, even standard, on some computers in the late 1970s to early 1990s. Video games were the type of application most commonly distributed using this technique. The term PC booter is also used, primarily in reference to self-

booting In computing, booting is the process of starting a computer as initiated via hardware such as a button or by a software command. After it is switched on, a computer's central processing unit (CPU) has no software in its main memory, so som ...

software for IBM PC compatibles. On other computers, like the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

and

Atari 8-bit family The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE, ...

, almost all software is self-booting. On the IBM PC, the distinction is between self-booting software and that which uses DOS-compatible operating systems. The term "PC booter" was not contemporary to when self-booting games were being released.

Benefits

* The software starts automatically, without any further action required by the user. * Copy prevention, because self-booting floppies often use a nonstandard filesystem or format. * Bypassing the normal operating system to use a specialized replacement.

Drawbacks

* The user needs to reboot the system to run other software. * The application cannot co-exist with other data or applications stored on a hard disk. * Hardware normally supported by the operating system may not work.

Examples

* Between 1983 and 1984, Digital Research offered several of their business and educational applications for the IBM PC on bootable floppy diskettes bundled with SpeedStart CP/M, a reduced version of

CP/M-86 CP/M-86 was a version of the CP/M operating system that Digital Research (DR) made for the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088. The system commands are the same as in CP/M-80. Executable files used the relocatable .CMD file format. Digital Research als ...

as a bootable runtime environment. *

Infocom Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''. ...

offered the only third-party games for the Macintosh at launch by distributing them with its own bootable operating system. * A scaled down version of GeoWorks was used by

America Online AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...

for their AOL client software until the late 1990s. AOL was distributed on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk, which could be used to boot GeoWorks as well. * In 1998,

Caldera A caldera ( ) is a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcano eruption. When large volumes of magma are erupted over a short time, structural support for the rock above the magma chamber is ...

distributed a demo version of their 32-bit DPMI web-browser and mail client DR-WebSpyder on a bootable fully self-contained 3.5-inch floppy. On 386 PCs with a minimum of 4 MB of RAM, the floppy would boot a minimal DR-DOS 7.02 system complete with memory manager, RAM disk, dial-up modem, LAN, mouse and display drivers and automatically launch into the graphical browser, without ever touching the machine's hard disk. Users could start browsing the web immediately after entering their access credentials.

Benefits

Drawbacks

Examples

See also

References

Further reading