components but in reducing the number of pre programmed elements on board from two bios 14 and hard disk 18 to one usb disk 32 thus saving in logistics and in manufacturing costs mass storage device 36 may be any memory medium that is compatible with the usb standard including magnetic usb hard disks and flash usb data disks there is no particular significance to the technology used for mass storage device 36 on the other hand there is significance to the technology used in directly executable memory 34 directly executable memory 34 can not use magnetic media but may be based on executable flash media or on any other semiconductor nonvolatile executable media it often is important to minimize the number of pins in connector 42 in some preferred embodiments of the present invention some or all of the pins of the two interfaces are shared fig3 is a schematic block diagram of an architecture of the present invention that supports such pin sharing the architecture of fig3 is the same as the architecture of fig2 except that the respective connectors 40 and 42 of pc 11 u2032 and usb disk 32 u2032 now include respective switches 48 and 50 that allow connector 42 to use a common set of pins for both usb protocol signals 44.