[tlug] Flash Memory History & BIOS Durability (or lack thereof)

[Lyle H Saxon <llletters@example.com>]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 9:31 PM,  <jep200404@example.com> wrote:
>
Re: >> I think maybe the BIOS maintainer battery (what's the
>> proper term for that anyway?) died and they lost their BIOS?  Is that
>> how that works?  (No BIOS, no computer.)
> re-setting the BIOS settings. There were (are?) a few terribly
> written BIOSs for which if the settings are garbled for whatever
> reason (such as but [not] limited to a dead battery), the BIOS could
> not run, even to allow the settings to be reset or corrected.

I suspect those two old 486 Dynabook computers I had (which were made
before flash memory was in production (Wikipedia ref: "Toshiba
announced NAND flash at the 1987 International Electron Devices
Meeting.".  They had 486 processors and came with W-3.1 and/or OS/2.
Pentiums came out in... 1993 (Wikipedia ref: "The original Pentium and
Pentium MMX processors were the superscalar follow-on to the 80486
processor and were marketed from 1993 to 1999.").  So - before the
advent of flash memory, no power meant meant no memory, didn't it?

Lyle