On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 03:31:48PM -0400, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
This is not a "Dell-specific BIOS hack". Dear child, ask your folks about PCs. I think it was only this decade that PCs would actually boot
This decade being the 2010s? :-)
*without* a keyboard. EVERY PC EVER MADE before would not.
It's true that really old PCs couldn't boot without a keyboard which lead to the joke "Keyboard missing. Press F1 to continue"
However the change to the hardware to allow a keyboardless boot came in a lot longer than a decade ago. It might have been with the 386 based hardware, but I really can't remember. I know I had a PC built in the 90s which has a BIOS option to halt on all errors, or halt on all errors except keyboard.
Here's a PDF from 1998 showing the option http://www.elhvb.com/mboards/luckytech/P6BX2.pdf
I'm sure sufficient googling would find even older examples.
Of course modern PCs may not even _have_ a keyboard port; USB only!