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Why Intel Wants BIOS Dead

Posted by timothy on from the because-bios-stole-its-harley dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This brief, readable whitepaper by Brian Richardson, a product manager at BIOS-vendor AMI, examines the history of BIOS firmware and explains why chipmaker Intel has invested much time and effort to create and promote a firmware framework to replace BIOS. Why would a chip company care about firmware? Read Richardson's paper about the 'Evolution of BIOS: EFI, the Framework, and beyond' to find out."

1 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Uh. I think I'm missing something here. by Fallen+Andy · · Score: 1, Troll

    What's the big deal. I was porting OS's back in the
    early 80's and if by "BIOS" you mean that miserable
    piece of shit that lives in ROM it was mostly only
    capable of loading sector zero of the "whinnie"
    (which is exactly what we did when it didn't).
    (translation for newtimers: Winchester = hard disk.
    "whinnie or winnie = hard disk right?).

    So, why in name would you stick this thing in a ROM? It could have always lived and been loaded off the friggin disk. Do it that way and you get the
    benefit of being able to update things for the future. Better still, you don't have *any* nightmares of that pesky little scuzzball Yannis Questidis hosing the flash...

    Yes, he might be able to touch the HD, but any sensible OS implementor *knows* how to track that.

    Hmm.

    In any case what most of you PC "children" think of as a BIOS is really a truly sucky monitor program. Gosh TIM on a CBM Pet was almost as
    good. Oh god. I want to go back and port UCSD again... or even CP/M - 68k...

    But, I'm going to calm down now. My doctor says I must consider the effect on my health.