Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS?

Koskun asks: "With all the time and technology that has come and gone with computers why must we still use a floppy disk to flash the BIOS anymore? Yes, some manufacturers are enabling BIOS flash from within Windows, but there are still a lot of motherboards out there that require you to find a floppy to flash the BIOS. It took me two floppy drives and four floppy disks just to find one of each that worked." Are there reasons why BIOS manufacturers haven't moved BIOS flashing to modern media like USB flash drives, or bootable CD-ROMs?

Comments

The answer is: Mu

[moonbender]

The question is inane. As others already have pointed out, you don't have to use a floppy to flash your BIOS, and you never had to. Yes, some boards will only let you flash from within something like DOS, but how you get to a DOS environment never mattered at all. Boot from anything, a CD, a memory stick, network, or a hard disk, it doesn't matter. Make it writable if you want to back up the current image.
To save myself from burning a CD every time an update was released, I created a tiny (100 meg) FAT16 partition and just one DOS boot CD. I couldn't access the NTFS drives from DOS, but the FAT16 partition containing the BIOS images was no problem. I stopped having a floppy disk drive attached to my computer years ago.
And of course, these days I just flash from within Windows. The (perceived) added danger of things going wrong makes it all more exciting!

Perhabs a better question would have been - are there ways to flash from within Linux these days? Last I looked (a long time ago), I couldn't find anything reliable.