PC booter
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A PC booter, or booter, is a type of software for home computer era (early 1980s to early 1990s) personal computers. This type of software was loaded and run when the computer bootup (either warm boot or cold boot).
Most home computer era home computers lacked hard drives or other types of large capacity secondary storage. The most popular type of secondary storage was floppy disk and most software was distributed on this medium. A great deal of software, especially games, were designed to be run at bootup, that is, when the computer was started or restarted. The included software would then start automatically, without any further action required by the user.
Since the computer read all its instructions from the floppy disk, software developers could include custom operating systems for their applications to use. Most often, however, a subset of the "standard" operating system was used (for example, DOS for IBM PC compatible, Apple DOS or ProDOS for Apple II, etc.).
Today, IBM PC compatible computers can still be booted by booter disks, if the computer's BIOS is set to boot from floppy disk. However, with the widespread use of hard disks, CD-ROMs and DVDs, almost no software is distributed as booters any longer.
[edit] PC compatibles
The IBM PC compatibles boot sequence for a disk drive specifies executing a file called AUTOEXEC.BAT (a batch file). The file specified which commands were initially to be run, and could often just include the name of the program that was to be run.
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