Any piece of hardware containing files the computer needs to start is called a boot device. When BIOS boots up a computer, it first determines whether all of the necessary attachments are in place and operational. When users turn on their computer, the microprocessor passes control to the BIOS program, which is always located at the same place on EPROM. BIOS is a program that is made accessible to the microprocessor on an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) chip. In contrast, an OS like Windows or iOS can either be pre-installed by the manufacturer or vendor or installed by the user.

How does BIOS work?īIOS comes included with computers, as firmware on a chip on the motherboard. Although, in some cases, BIOS can arrange for data to flow directly to memory from devices, such as video cards, that require faster data flow to be effective. BIOS is theoretically always the intermediary between the microprocessor and I/O device control information and data flow. The main use of BIOS is to act as a middleman between OSes and the hardware they run on. Intel announced a plan in 2017 to retire support for legacy BIOS systems by 2020, replacing them with UEFI.

However, BIOS' popularity has waned in favor of a newer technology: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI). It was incorporated into IBM's first personal computer in 1981 and, in the years to come, gained popularity within other PCs, becoming an integral part of computers for some time. The term BIOS was first coined in 1975 by American computer scientist Gary Kildall. It also manages data flow between the computer's operating system (OS) and attached devices, such as the hard disk, video adapter, keyboard, mouse and printer. Ben Lutkevich, Technical Features WriterīIOS (basic input/output system) is the program a computer's microprocessor uses to start the computer system after it is powered on.

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