Welcome to The Sandbox
Computers are created from
sand, or silicon. A little bit of Myrtle beach, 10 bazillion man-hours
of engineering and you can build your own computer. Here, in Mama’s
Sandbox we’re going to remove the case cover and see what works and what
works even better.
Learning from the Boot Sequence. Let’s look at what the computer
tells you as it boots up. When you turn your computer on, it flashes
some white words on a black screen. The very first line of type declares
the name and version of your BIOS.
The BIOS is the Basic Input and Output System. This is the chip that
detects and tests all of the hardware and memory on your computer. In
the old days, back in the 1970’s, if you wanted a computer to recognize
that you had a keyboard, and that pressing the “y” key meant, “yes,” you
had to write the code for that. Now, that is handled by the BIOS. So
BIOS is the software code that controls system devices. (technical term)
The BIOS is a little chip on your motherboard.
