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Did computer motherboard firmware not have memory test boot programs back then?

• cesarb 6y ago
  The BIOS (nobody called it firmware) of that era was very limited. You could do little more than setting a few configuration options (which were stored in the battery-backed RTC chip aka "CMOS", barely a hundred bytes including the ones keeping the date and time), including things like which floppy drives and hard disk drives were present.
• guenthert 6y ago
  Yes, not sure when they started doing that, but even 386 of the very early nineties had a memory test part of POST. I suspect it started when PC clones came with empty memory slots the users could populate themselves, i.e. the memory configuration wasn't otherwise known in advance. That memory test was however most basic and shouldn't take too long. It was generally insufficient to determine whether memory was reliable.