9. The Unix Boot Sequence
When the computer is switched on, the first thing it does is to activate
resident on the system board in a ROM (read-only memory) chip.
The operating system is not available at this stage so that the computer
must 'pull itself up by its own boot-straps' so to speak.
This procedure is thus often referred to as bootstrapping, also known
as cold boot. Although the bootstrap procedure is very hardware dependent
(try man boot under Solaris),
it typically consists of the following steps: