On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 12:32:25PM -0400, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:
No, it wasn't always like that. AFAICR the ability to flash the BIOS from a memory stick is a more recent thing. Until this latest hardware upgrade I had not seen a motherboard that had the ability to reprogram itself without the need of some special program which would only run under either DOS or Windows.
In the very early days flashing a BIOS meant pulling the memory chip out of the board and replacing it, or using a UV light to erase the EPROM containing the BIOS and reprogram it using a device for programming EPROMs. That was a very different time.
I remember ordering a BIOS from Microid Research (MR BIOS) to replace the stock BIOS on an Asus 486 board. What a huge improvement that chip was over the original. HD limit went from 500MB to 137GB, supported up to 4 floppies and 8 IDE drives, BIOS started boot in under 5 seconds from power on, etc. Wonderful thing. Yeah it was a chip swap at that time to do a BIOS update. -- Len Sorensen