Functionality Of BIOS Essay Research Paper What

Functionality Of BIOS Essay, Research Paper

What is the function of BIOS chips? I have often wondered this. How did they come about? How do they work? Yes, BIOS chips have been a bit of a mystery. I will research this and see if I can understand them a bit more by doing so.

“The ROM BIOS chip transfers information from the keyboard into computer language of zeros and ones.” This was the first thing I came across while searching for a true definition of a BIOS chip. The location of this was on the discovery channel’s page, and it seemed to be meant for children, so I decided that this must have been a *very* simplified explanation, to give children a general gist of what it does. I disagree with teaching children this way, for if they ever become a computer science major they will have to be untrained of this illusion (but that is a separate paper entirely).

“The problem with the year 2000 is that the BIOS in many of today’s PCs operates under a date format that uses two digits to represent and store the year, so they will falsely claim that the year 2000 (or 00) falls before the year 1999 (or 99). If a computer’s system clock reads the date incorrectly, then all mission-critical applications, all file time stamping, and even scheduled backups are predicted to fail. But this problem will not afflict the Macintosh. Since it’s introduction, the Macintosh has had the ability to correctly handle the year 2000 and beyond. The Macintosh operating system uses a 32-bit value to store seconds, meaning that the Macintosh clock will work correctly until the year 2040.” The “Year 2000 problem” is something I had heard of as well, but I was unclear of. Apple’s web page did a nice job of explaining it, but once again, I don’t know how effective it is to listen to a company who is in competition with IBM compatible machines.

Perhaps I should refine my search constraints a bit more and see what happens.

I managed to find a web page belonging to a BIOS manufacturer. Their web page was very helpful for me. From their web page, I found that BIOS stands for Basic Input and Output System. “Because it is stored in a Read-Only Memory (ROM) chip on the motherboard, it is sometimes call the ROM BIOS. The BIOS is the first program to run when you turn on the computer. It initializes and tests the hardware in your computer (a process called POST for Power On Self Test). Finally, after everything is running, the BIOS program loads and runs your operating system. Another function of the BIOS is to run Setup for making changes in your computer. A third function of the BIOS is to help operating systems and application programs manage the hardware by means of a set of routines called BIOS Run-Time Services.” This is what I consider to be a lot more helpful than the earlier quotes I managed to find. This quote is from a technical page, and does clear up some things. The reason I chose the BIOS research was so that I would learn more about what BIOS is, and now I realize that the setup is not the BIOS, but only a part of it. I see that it is integrated into a few parts.

As a part of the BIOS, the setup will allow you to change the setting on your computer. There are many options in setup, many of which I don’t understand. I have a pretty good knowledge of BIOS setup, but many of the options I still do not understand and am kind of afraid of (for example, LBA mode). There are many fine tuning options you can set there, such as power on number lock, and more important items contained within, such as hard drive type and the like. Somewhat recently, the release of “plug and play BIOS” led me to believe the BIOS was only made up only of the part I know now as the setup, but I understand the “plug and play” does not necessarily describe the whole BIOS, but the setup. Plug and play BIOS contains more advanced settings than the older setup programs did. Once again, from their web site, I found a huge list of improvements to AMIBIOS; their new version called AMIBIOS 98. “There is boot support for the operating system from a variety of bootable devices, including HDD, FDD, DVD, CD-ROMs, or a Removable High-Capacity Floppy such as LS-120, ZIP and MO drives. AMIBIOS 98 offers full support for the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard. USB technologies allows users to quickly and easily attach and reconfigure a wide range of peripheral devices, from keyboards to printers to monitor devices. WINBIOS Icon-Based BIOS Setup Interface Provides Easy Access and Configuration of System Parameters, and BIOS Anti-Virus Boot Track Protection is also implemented. Also implemented was enhanced IDE Support, supporting devices such as CD-ROMs, Zip Drives, and LS 120 Floptical drives. There is a Large Mode Hard Disk Auto Detect and Auto Configuration up to 4 Drives.” Much of this was paraphrased, since the page had things in list form, and much of the material contained was not as impressive as the highlights chosen. The multiple boot support is very impressive to me. In Macintosh systems, booting off a CD-ROM drive is possible. However, I did not even realize that function is now also available on the IBM compatible side. The Universal Serial Bus also seemed to me to be a great improvement over earlier BIOS. Built in BIOS virus scanning and an icon based setup will make things a lot easier for people who don’t know what they are doing, people who would usually have to call technical support lines to