On some home computers like the Apple II, software is loaded by inserting a floppy disk and turning on or resetting the machine.
Most self-booting programs are written to not need features of an existing operating system, such as MS-DOS, and access the hardware directly or use low-level functions that are built into read-only memory.
The self-booting game or application cannot easily use computer hardware normally accessed through device drivers in the operating system.
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.
[7][8] 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.