Bootable CD-ROM

Until early 1995, you had no way to boot your computer from the CD-ROM
drive, which meant that if you built a new machine (or replaced the disk in an
old one), you had to boot from a floppy, install drivers, and build up the disk
contents from there.
The El Torito Bootable CD-ROM Format Specification — standardized in
January of 1995 — changed that. (Legend has it that the name El Torito is from
the El Torito Mexican restaurant where the specification was initially worked
136 Part IV ✦ Storage
out.) Essentially, all systems now have BIOS support for El Torito, so if you
have a bootable CD-ROM, you can load the drive, start the machine, and have
it come up from the operating system on the CD-ROM. If you’re building a
machine up from an empty hard disk, the bootable CD-ROMs you get for
Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux let you start the install without shuffling floppies
or worrying about drivers. Bootable CD-ROMs are so successful and prevalent
that many manufacturers are dropping floppy disk drives from their systems,
relying on CD-ROM if an emergency boot is ever required.