creat 1230

On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 12:21:11 +0000, jmfbahciv

Jobs tried that, with his NeXT. The original concept was that the computer had no permanent storage; every user carried around their own 256MB magop disk that contained a fully bootable installation of NeXTStep and all the bundled applications, with considerable room left over for user documents.

It turned out that the magop drives were too slow, and there was little or no support for any sneakernet type of data exchange. Eventually hard drives started appearing on the systems, at first with just the basic parts of the OS, then with more and more of the bundled applications, and then they finally moved to the conventional user-owned concept for each box.

The idea still continues to surface here and there; the "live CD" concept as popularized by the Knoppix Linux distribution is an example, though Knoppix does not usually treat its boot disc as writable even if it's on CD-RW media. However, Knoppix can use whatever local resources that are available, including other removable storage. One could use a second, rewritable optical drive, or floppies, or various USB removable storage devices, or memory cards for multimedia devices. It's more to carry around than Jobs's single disc, and requires that the appropriate extra reader(s) be available on the machine being used, but it's a similar concept.