Hardware Bible

Except for the occasional deranged laughter that rings through the halls, you might never know she was there, and you don't think about her again until the next reel of the B-movie that makes up your life. As with your own old Aunt Maud, your comput...

Although mostly invisible and oft forgotten, your computer's BIOS is nevertheless one of its most important and enabling parts. The BIOS is, in fact, the one essential constituent that distinguishes one computer from another, even when they both shar...

The BIOS starts to work as soon as you switch your system on. When all modern Intel microprocessors start to work, they immediately set themselves up in real mode and look at a special memory location that is exactly 16 bytes short of the top of the ...

Although the primary role for the BIOS today is to get your computer started, it retains the name it earned from its function as the software-to-hardware interface of your machine. It is a control system that operates at the lowest possible level (th...

But the BIOS also incorporates storage functions that go beyond the bytes encapsulated in its ROM silicon. Although physically separate from the BIOS chips themselves, the setup memory of your computer is controlled by BIOS functions and is often con...

At one time, engineers viewed the BIOS as a great sculpture or other great work of art, fixed forever in time, perfect and immutable. The BIOS code would be written in read-only memory chips that could not be altered, at least by mere mortals without...