It is also the job of Kickstart to set up the hardware, and to determine what hardware the machine has – in this way an Amiga 2000 can load Workbench from a hard disk drive connected within the machine (if it has one), or an Amiga CDTV or CD32 can load software from a CD-ROM. Once Kickstart has finished doing basic checks of the hardware and loading the various modules within it, the system is now ready to load software from disk – that could be a game, a program such as Deluxe Paint III, or it could be the Amiga Workbench. The majority of the Amigas Operating System is located within Kickstart, but in order to retain flexibility and enable any module to be updated by loading it from disk. There is more information on what Kickstart is on the page “ What is Kickstart?“. Once Kickstart is available to the system, the Amiga starts following the instructions within Kickstart, which is made up of a series of modules which are loaded as required, which prepare the computer for use. On almost all other machines (asides from early Amiga 3000 machines), instead of a “bootstrap” ROM, the system instead started directly from the Kickstart, which was in a ROM within the machine, so there was no need to load Kickstart from a disk. This was designed in this way because Kickstart was still being heavily revised and improved upon at the time of the launch of the Amiga 1000, and by loading it from Disk in this way it enabled Commodore to distribute new versions of Kickstart quickly and easily, not to mentioned inexpensively, to all owners of the Amiga 1000, without a need to distribute expensive ROM chips and require the owners to open the machine to replace them.
Once there was a valid Kickstart in the WOM, the bootstrap ROM detected that, so instead of prompting for the Kickstart Disk, it instead told the Amiga 1000 to follow the instructions in the Kickstart.
In the Amiga 1000, this was referred to as the “bootstrap” ROM, and it was an extremely minimal bit of computer code that prompted the user to insert the Kickstart Disk, and then once the system detected that the Kickstart Disk was inserted, it loaded the contents of the Kickstart Disk into the special 256K of WOM (Write Once Memory), changed this memory to be Read Only Memory, and then restarted the machine. When an Amiga is first turned on, the very first thing it does is load in some computer code from Read Only Memory (ROM) and it then follows those instructions. The intention of this page is to help people understand what each of these things is, and how they relate to each other. For people not familiar with the Amiga, it may appear confusing when people talk about Kickstart, Workbench and the AmigaOS, what each of those things is, and how they relate to each other.