Inquiring minds want to know, the programers button?

[DearthnVader]

Anyone know the point of the programers button, under the power button on G4 desktop Macs?

I mean, you just hold the power button to put the machine into programers mode, or load the defaults to recover bad nvram settings, so what does the little button do?

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Well, the obvious - it boots you into open firmware. IIRC early OS9 firmware updates required it and is why you see it on G3 and G4 systems. I have never had a need to use it though, so the use case for it must be very specific. I've always thought of it as a vestigial left over from those machines that spanned Classic OS to OSX.