I think it was just done that way for convenience when debugging the port. From what I remember, the Alpha firmware will happily boot from a floppy if you have the layout correct, and the layout is something trivial like a start address and a count of following blocks to load.
--jim On Tue Jan 3 15:10:14 EST 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Anyone remember off the top of their heads why the Alpha bootloader had to be > downloaded over TFTP? Is there a good reason why it couldn't be started from > a floppy (or hard disk)? > > Last time I tried to get it up and running, the Alpha boot stuff didn't like > being served from a non-Plan9 server... > > ...and yes, I know the Alpha is dying. I'm not giving mine up, though. > > -Ben
