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>Sorry for the snip, Ed. First, if ROM BIOS, however, did provide at least some service beyond boot, wouldn't there be a performance improvement? Second, I tthink at least some services (disk size, drive types, etc.) are provided through ROM BIOS interrupts aren't they? Or has that gone the way of the dinosaur? Third, if the machines had been designed for a GUI in the first place, wouldn't they be radically different from the machines we now have?
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First, using ROM BIOS doesn't guarentee better speed, only a common interface to standardized functions for a device class. It isn't guarenteed to be optimal, and it's no more efficient to call than a driver. In fact, unless the ROM content is copied into RAM (shadowed), ROM tends to be as much as an order of magnitude slower to access than informatiin inmain RAM.

Except during boot, drive parameters and types do not use the BIOS code to make the determination about what's present. In fact, systems that use drive overlay software like Disk Manager that changes the geometry in the drive table, and often add newer, more efficient code to deal with old BIOSes that don't understand LBA, etc.

The presense of GUI elements in the BIOS doesn't change the OS, at least in theory. If the BIOS contains the same common code now in the GUI core rather than a system device driver, there's no change. Not relying on BIOS code makes replacing key elements of the system's low-level common functions easier.

>BTW, that was a great post. Thanks much.