Keith,
Your posting boilerplate is still a mess:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win98/post?1203729019


||Keith did mention CMOS Setup
||(and, like 99% of the people who talk about it, incorrectly called it "BIOS").
|| gewg_

|I've always known it as the BIOS. BasicInputOoutputSystem.
| Keith Stanier
|
There is something called BIOS
and there is something called CMOS (and something called CMOS Setup).
The concepts are different
and those concepts relate directly to the hardware used to implement them.
Stick with me; this gets good at the bottom.

|If you do a search for BIOS you get 124,000,000 replies.
|If you search for CMOS you only get 23,800,000
|
As Complementary-Symmetry Metal Oxide Semiconductor
is a very common technology for chip construction
and is used in lots of devices which have *nothing* to do with IBM computers,
I find those results to be curious.

|so which term is more common?
|
Ah.  The old (poorly implemented) "Might makes right" argument.
To explain the numbers, let me say that I have found that
in most fields of endeavor, ignorance abounds.
WRT computers, I've found that
Microsoft is a reason for a lot of the ignorance that exists;
they say something wrong and it gets repeated eternally (e.g. "Boot from").


The fact is, "BIOS chip" is deceptive.

The BIOS chip actually does 2 functions, each at a different time:

The part which Basic Input/Output System SHOULD make you think of
comes into play *later*--AFTER the system has booted (i.e. a single beep is heard);
the B.I.O.S. part lets an Intel-compatible CPU run a specific type of program
(BELOW the level of any operating system).
The fact that these routines *can* be called,
makes 
the computer "IBM-compatible" (in a software sense).

The other part of that chip is a Bootstrap Loader.
(I mentioned M$'s error before: you "boot from" the BootLoader;
you hope to "boot to" a drive of some type.

The **BootLoader** part of the chip is what concerns us here.

In the original IBM PC (Intel 8088), the BootLoader had the CPU poll a DIP switch
to get the hardware configuration, then proceeded to initialize the hardware.
Starting with the IBM AT (80286) the hardware configuration is stored in "CMOS".

If you take the CMOS battery out, the 
firmware in the ROM 
BIOS DOES NOT CHANGE[1].

OTOH, without the battery, the CMOS Setup data
is quickly lost from the small segment of your RAM
which is battery-backed-up 
static RAM (CMOS SRAM).


[1] The way you get data into ROM BIOS
is dramatically different from writing to RAM:
"Flashing" a BIOS can't be done without a specific intent
to permanently alter the way the computer works.

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