On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 18:00:42 -0400, Ralph Mowery
wrote:

In article ,
says...
Could you always boot from a USB drive? My BIOS didn't have that
option.
Most of todays computers no longer use a "bios"

That has still become the buzz word for the firmware that turns a
bunch of random chips into a computer.



If not, what takes the place of the BIOS ? Maybe something like it by a
different name ? The Microsoft type computers I know of need something
in the hardware/firmware to tell the processor how to start up the hard
drive to load an operating system of some sort and where the video and
key board/mouse is.

Maybe something like the Chrome Book does not use it as such.


They all need some kind of firmware to match each chip set to the
instruction set and to establish the environment. This probably traces
it back to the IBM 360 system where there was a vast difference in the
hardware under the covers of the various models but they all ran the
same instruction set because of the firmware loaded. At that time it
was called microcode but it had the same function. In fact the ones
with reloadable code could actually emulate other types of computer.