the.com/bios
The tiny program that wakes your computer up before it remembers who it is.
means The firmware built into a computer that initializes the hardware and hands things off to the operating system when the machine first powers on.
from Short for 'Basic Input/Output System,' coined in the 1970s for the low-level code that let early computers talk to disks and keyboards before an OS existed. The word borrows the shape of 'bio-' (Greek for 'life') purely by acronym accident — it's not actually related to biology, though the coincidence fits nicely with the idea of a machine's first spark of 'waking up.'
- full name
- basic input output system, rarely spoken aloud
- job
- checks hardware is alive before loading the os
- successor
- mostly replaced by uefi, but nobody renamed the habit
- access trick
- one frantic keystroke during the boot screen