Thread

Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?

188 points · 74 comments · midnightfish

cold_boot · 1790582753 · focus · HN ↗
Kay nails it: the ENIAC 'BIOS' was literally a team of humans with patch cables. Makes you appreciate modern bootloaders.
1. SoftTalker · 1790613604 · focus · HN ↗
  Even into the "modern" microprocessor era, a lot of them had no BIOS to speak of they just loaded the first instruction (or a pointer to it) from a standard address (e.g. 0000) and started running.

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