On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 9:00:29 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 16:36:29 -0700 (PDT), trader_4
wrote:

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 7:09:57 PM UTC-4, wrote:
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.

AT it's most minimum level, all a motherboard needs is enough code
to get the hardware running up to the point of loading the operating
system, or whatever code it's ultimately going to run. When it
powers up, the CPU goes to it's reset location in memory and starts
fetching the first instructions, from there and executing them.
That code has to be in Flash or some kind of non-volatile memory, so
it's always there at power-up. That first code
then initializes whatever hardware in the system needs to be
setup in order to get enough of it running so that it can load more
code, eg loading the OS from a disk drive, to make it fully functional, a process called bootstrapping.

Hence "Basic Input Output System". That firmware is what makes all of
the various chip sets speak "Intel".

It's more like speak IBM and MSFT. They are the ones that came up
with the BIOS that went into the first Intel architecture PCs that
became the modern PC industry, not Intel. At that point, Intel was
just a chip manufacturer and IBM wound up picking the 8088 as the
CPU for it;s first PC.