Self-booting disk

Benefits

• The software starts automatically, without any further action required by the user.
• Copy prevention, because self-booting floppies often use a nonstandard filesystem or format.
• Bypassing the normal operating system to use a specialized replacement.

  Drawbacks

• The user needs to reboot the system to run other software.
• The application cannot co-exist with other data or applications stored on a hard disk.
• Hardware normally supported by the operating system may not work.

  Examples

• Between 1983 and 1984, Digital Research offered several of their business and educational applications for the IBM PC on bootable floppy diskettes bundled with SpeedStart CP/M, a reduced version of CP/M-86 as a bootable runtime environment.
• Infocom offered the only third-party games for the Macintosh at launch by distributing them with its own bootable operating system.
• A scaled down version of GeoWorks was used by America Online for their AOL client software until the late 1990s. AOL was distributed on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk, which could be used to boot GeoWorks as well.
• In 1998, Caldera distributed a demo version of their 32-bit DPMI web-browser and mail client DR-WebSpyder on a bootable fully self-contained 3.5-inch floppy. On 386 PCs with a minimum of 4 MB of RAM, the floppy would boot a minimal DR-DOS 7.02 system complete with memory manager, RAM disk, dial-up modem, LAN, mouse and display drivers and automatically launch into the graphical browser, without ever touching the machine's hard disk. Users could start browsing the web immediately after entering their access credentials.