On Jul 21, 2020, at 9:26 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

That was always really funny to me.  Your machine boots MacOS, presumably because it was easier to let it deal with hardware initialization than to rewrite it

This is actually because the Mac OS is already in the middle of booting, because big chunks of it were ROM-resident. The ROM didn't just exist as a bootstrap loader for any OS; it was a subset of the OS that just loaded more of itself, replaced parts of itself, etc.

This only ended with the adoption of Open Firmware by the "New World" PCI-based Power Macintosh series. Even there, the second-stage bootstrap invoked by Open Firmware to get Mac OS up and running was actually a file on disk named "Mac OS ROM."

  -- Chris