Phoenix Technologies Ltd reckons there is a big future in being able to boot your personal computer not from the hard disk or from a floppy, but from a CD-ROM drive, and it has come up with a BIOS to support the facility. It eliminates that absurd game of floppy swappy you have to play with today’s bloated and voluminous software, and it means that software vendors that are really serious about piracy can deliver their programs in a form that can only run direct from the compact disk, which effectively eliminates the need to back up the application – in contrast to a slow floppy, a relatively fast CD-ROM should last for at least the lifetime of the program if you treat it with respect. And for those of a nervous disposition, since the CD-ROM is a read-only device, CD-ROMs are impervious to viruses that weren’t encoded on in their manufacture. Phoenix is of course the company that did most to ensure that the second generation of IBM Personalike makers – the best of which are all still around today – would be able to build machines that would be out of IBM Corp’s legal reach by designing 100% compatible BIOSes in a location where all the coders were quarantined from anyone that had actually seen the code of the original IBM BIOS they were cloning. Underlining how much the world has changed since then, IBM actually helped out with development of the new BIOS, the Bootable CD-ROM Specification 1.0, which describes how IDE- and SCSI-based CD-ROM drives can be used in place of floppy or hard disks as boot devices. The specification is now available in the Norwood, Massachusetts company’s PhoenixBIOS 4.0. The feature will enable system manufacturers to ship their machines with a single compact disk that contains everything needed for system configuration: operating system, applications and programs, saving hours of time spent playing floppy swappy. The Bootable CD-ROM Specification 1.0 defines a CD-ROM format and INT 13 extensions that enable systems to detect and boot CD-ROMs without any device driver. CD-ROM boot images can emulate a 1.2Mb, 1.44Mb or 2.88Mb floppy image or a hard disk. The BIOS, on finding a bootable CD-ROM, makes the CD-ROM device appear to the CPU as a floppy or hard disk.
