This was a Lenovo. Now I’m wondering if Windows or Linux has a better BIOS.
It’s right there in the name:
Basic Input Output Operating System
It’s the first stage of whatever os you run.
If you don’t think the BIOS is part of your operating system, just remove it and see how far you get on the next boot.
Edit: I was always told the I in BIOS was “I/O”. WAS I DECEIVED FOR ALL THIS TIME!?
BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System.
Semantically sure, it’s making your system operate, but it’s technically part of your motherboard’s firmware.
It’s the underlying system. You can run tiny bare metal programs in your boot sector that simply call bios functions to output to the screen and write to disk and beep the speaker, just like you can call functions to the windows or Linux kernels to do the same.
Although granted the only functions called these days are to set the CPU to protected mode and goodbye BIOS until the next boot.
hmm. it’s a good point. it seems to me though that that just isn’t what “operating system” refers to, since these programs can’t actually manage the system in a meaningful way or do anything you’d really expect from an OS.
But circling back to OP’s screenshot it only mentions that it’s part of the OS. A pretty small part these days compared to DOS, but it’s still doing stuff.
I guess it comes down to whether you consider all the initialisation/bootstrap/hardware configuration routines to be part of an operating system.
Which is Operating System too, just not windows.
“Operating system” has a specific meaning and BIOS isn’t one.
One truth, one lie in the title. Guess which one’s which.
I feel like their goal was to dumb it down and that they could have done that without misinformation.
My man right here gets it :)
I mean it is part of the System running on that machine. So it is technically part of the OS?
I’m having a crisis here thinking about this lol. It’s a part of the system that is your machine if you consider the system to be the entire use of the computer. But it is not a part of the operating system on the drive. It’s a lower level operating system that identifies your hardware’s capabilities and functionality and has sets of instructions on how to boot from your storage. Computers are really just many many layers of abstraction. Separating the abstractions into layers gets pretty complex. But if you create a virtual OS inside of your storage device’s OS, it is its own OS. It has no knowledge that it’s a virtual machine.
If you asked somebody which operating system they were using they would say Linux or Windows etc. The BIOS is not part of these.
