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Is there such a thing as ROM software?
How much "space" can a ROM chip hold? I know this may sound stupid,
but why can't they put the Operating System on a ROM chip and make it faster? Or Microsoft Office on a ROM chip? I was just thinking about it and was curious. Thanks for indulging me. |
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In article ,
jm wrote: How much "space" can a ROM chip hold? I know this may sound stupid, but why can't they put the Operating System on a ROM chip and make it faster? Or Microsoft Office on a ROM chip? I was just thinking about it and was curious. Thanks for indulging me. It depends on who "they" is, and what's the purpose of the OS, and the computer it's installed in. Most of the OS in a Palm Pilot is in ROM. There is a Linux in ROM in many Linksys routers. Cable TV desktop boxes have some flavor of Unix in them. Lots of other consumer devices do. There is an OS (fsvo "OS") in ROM in your PC. It's the BIOS and it's just bright enough to book the OS of your choice, be it WIn/98, Linux, Freebsd, XP, w2k, etc. And that's the point. Anything in ROM is static inflexible. Besides, if it's in ROM you can't sell upgrades easily. -- Al Dykes ----------- adykes at p a n i x . c o m |
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jm wrote:
How much "space" can a ROM chip hold? I know this may sound stupid, but why can't they put the Operating System on a ROM chip and make it faster? Or Microsoft Office on a ROM chip? I was just thinking about it and was curious. Thanks for indulging me. These days, ROM is really flashram. And they have tons of storage these days. Just look at any memory stick, digital camera, MP3 player, or cellphone, and how much memory they have. Some of these things have several times more storage capacity than my first PC hard drive (my first one was a 30MB drive in a PC-XT clone). Yousuf Khan |
#4
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In article ,
Yousuf Khan wrote: jm wrote: How much "space" can a ROM chip hold? I know this may sound stupid, but why can't they put the Operating System on a ROM chip and make it faster? Or Microsoft Office on a ROM chip? I was just thinking about it and was curious. Thanks for indulging me. These days, ROM is really flashram. And they have tons of storage these days. Just look at any memory stick, digital camera, MP3 player, or cellphone, and how much memory they have. Some of these things have several times more storage capacity than my first PC hard drive (my first one was a 30MB drive in a PC-XT clone). Yousuf Khan 5MB hard disk.. ISTR the list price was $999. Slower than an old 1X CD reader. At the same time I had 200MB disk drives on the mainframe systems that cost $40k each. -- Al Dykes ----------- adykes at p a n i x . c o m |
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(The little lost angel) wrote in message ...
On 22 Sep 2004 17:05:35 -0700, (jm) wrote: How much "space" can a ROM chip hold? I know this may sound stupid, but why can't they put the Operating System on a ROM chip and make it faster? Or Microsoft Office on a ROM chip? I was just thinking about it and was curious. Thanks for indulging me. Cost? Right now even the cheapest 256MB of flashram costs something like US30 in retail. To just have Windows on it would need the equivalent of 8 pieces or around US$240. But the prices tend to go up exponentially with size. No thanks, I'll stick with my less than $1 per GB HDD :PpPpp I think it would be neat to plug in an Atari 2600 type cartridge that says Windows XP or Office XP! If it were really fast, I wouldn't care. And I'd have Combat, of course. |
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