Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

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At one time, engineers viewed the BIOS as a great sculpture or other great work of art, fixed forever in time, perfect and immutable. The BIOS code would be written in read-only memory chips that could not be altered, at least by mere mortals without electrical engineering degrees. But human frailties and rapidly changing technologies forced them to change their minds. They made mistakes in writing some BIOSs that only became apparent after they were shipped off to consumers in finished computers. Or, a few months after they had finished work on their BIOSs—and after computers using them found their ways into consumers' hands—someone decided it would be great if hard disks could store twice as much as the BIOS made allowances for. The ...