From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ron minnich To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] EPIA CPU node success In-Reply-To: <4fd83591be5e3ac756d8da2b4e44263d@collyer.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 07:46:44 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 811bc960-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Geoff Collyer wrote: > Ron and jmk can probably correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that > almost none of the time-consuming stuff that the various PC BIOSes do is > necessary when running a competent OS; they may have been a help to DOS > twenty years ago. yep. And they still have to run dos 1.0, and that's why all the work is done. A lot of the BIOS has to work behind DOS's back, which explains a lot about why APM/ACMPI are so weird, not to mention all the weirdness in the hardware that also dates back to 1980, such as shadow registers. Don't get me started :-) ron