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I dunno, BIOS was pretty opaque and all the major BIOS vendors stuff was completely proprietary (and often full of bugs). The difference is that BIOS was simple

by gh02t 9y ago

I dunno, BIOS was pretty opaque and all the major BIOS vendors stuff was completely proprietary (and often full of bugs). The difference is that BIOS was simpler and hence easier to understand. It was also not as well-protected and if you wanted to you could extract and reverse engineer the BIOS with easily available tools. Nowadays the firmware in your machine is better protected as well as much more complex, making it harder to access and harder to understand.

userbinator 9y ago
The parent comment is saying "used to be", and that was actually very true before the IBM PS/2 and the AT clones --- IBM published the schematics and BIOS source code for the PC, XT, and AT in the PC Technical Reference books. https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmpcat618ferenceMar86_25829277 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmpcat618ferenceMar86... Even in the "AT clone" era (better known as "IBM PC Compatible"), the standards were relatively more open and there wasn't much in the way of DRM at all.
fao_ 9y ago
> Nowadays the firmware in your machine is better protected https://www.blackhat.com/eu-17/briefings/schedule/#how-to-hack-a-turned-off-computer-or-running-unsigned-code-in-intel-management-engine-8668 https://www.blackhat.com/eu-17/briefings/schedule/#how-to-ha...