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Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.


That's sadly true though. Also booting something was really simple.

Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed).

Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).


You can still have the 90s OS experience, even today, but these days we use the name bootloader, not operating system, for that amount of functionality.


Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.

What OS could I have loaded onto my Macintosh SE/30 that wasn't from Apple?


NetBSD.

Still supported, by the way. Does Apple support your Macintosh SE/30 still? I believe Linux was also supported.

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/


NetBSD for the Mac didn't come out until after the SE/30 was already discontinued, and even then was little more than a crashy, unusable beta mess, not a real operating system. It was a tech demo, not something you could do work with.


Really? You could run OS X on any hardware you bought? Or OpenVMS?




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