On Monday, June 13, 2022 11:35:29 AM Greg Wooledge wrote: > Let's get some actual numbers in here. From wikipedia: > > IBM PC with proprietary BIOS introduced: 1981 > Linus Torvalds begins writing Linux: 1991
Efforts started toward EFI (predecessor in some sense of UEFI) -- see below: 1998 > Intel stops doing EFI and starts contributing to UEFI: 2005 > Current year: 2022 > > Number of years PC BIOS had been around when Linux started: 10 > Number of years UEFI has been around now: 17 > > I don't know how well those two numbers are supposed to indicate that > UEFI "isn't new-fangled", but there they are. Very interesting / helpful. I wanted to see when EFI (the predecessor to UEFI) came into the picture. In the Wikipedia article [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#History] [Unified Extensible Firmware Interface]] I found: <quote> The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel–HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. BIOS limitations (such as 16-bit real mode, 1MB addressable memory space,[7] assembly language programming, and PC AT hardware) had become too restrictive for the larger server platforms Itanium was targeting.[8] The effort to address these concerns began in 1998 and was initially called Intel Boot Initiative.[9] It was later renamed to Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI).[10][11] </quote> So it looks like the effort towards that started in 1998. -- A picture, sketch, diagram, or chart is worth a thousand words -- divide by 10 for each minute of video (or audio) -- or, where feasible, create a transcript and edit it to 10% of the original! (Oxford comma included in this sig at no charge.)
