Hello, there was a software/hardware called The ZippA to boot from parallel port ZIP drives even on XT class computers. There used to be two versions:

1. with modified MBR on the local harddisk load some function and then the system can continue to boot from the ZIP drive before an OS is loaded from harddisk
2. a little 8 BIT ISA card with the BIOS code to boot from parallel port ZIP drive

What could be found until now:

https://brianlivingston.com/windowmanager/arc … st/bl060997.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20070407045456/ht … s.com/zppa.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20011227213205/ht … bin/ZPPA099.ZIP (evaluation version of the version 1)

Question: Does anybody has preserved the content of this BIOS chip?

Idea: Plug the BIOS on the empty boot ROM socket of a network card...