Re: [tlug] Flash Memory History & BIOS Durability (or lack thereof)

[Kalin KOZHUHAROV <me.kalin@example.com>]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 11:30, Lyle H Saxon <llletters@example.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 9:31 PM,  <jep200404@example.com> wrote:
>>
> Re: >> I think maybe the BIOS maintainer battery (what's the
>>> proper term for that anyway?) died and they lost their BIOS?  Is that
>>> how that works?  (No BIOS, no computer.)
>> re-setting the BIOS settings. There were (are?) a few terribly
>> written BIOSs for which if the settings are garbled for whatever
>> reason (such as but [not] limited to a dead battery), the BIOS could
>> not run, even to allow the settings to be reset or corrected.
>
> I suspect those two old 486 Dynabook computers I had (which were made
> before flash memory was in production (Wikipedia ref: "Toshiba
> announced NAND flash at the 1987 International Electron Devices
> Meeting.".  They had 486 processors and came with W-3.1 and/or OS/2.
> Pentiums came out in... 1993 (Wikipedia ref: "The original Pentium and
> Pentium MMX processors were the superscalar follow-on to the 80486
> processor and were marketed from 1993 to 1999.").  So - before the
> advent of flash memory, no power meant meant no memory, didn't it?
>
PC XT (i8088 or i8086 based), PC AT (i80386, i80486), and some (not
sure if Pentums were counted as AT), had BIOS in ROM and no upgrades
meant erasing with UV and reprogramming with a ROM programmer.
CMOS has always been there AFAIR and there was always a battery to
keep at least the RTC.

Kalin.