Phoenix BIOS - creating a clone industry on their own

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Fri, 11/03/2006 - 10:37am.

eWeek's number 18 technology is the Phoenix BIOS. When the IBM PC hit the market most of the technology and parts were available. The missing piece was the BIOS, which initializes the computer for the operating system. The Phoenix BIOS company understood this and got to work reverse engineering the IBM process.

When the BIOS was made available to other companies, sales of the clone PCs took off. This allowed Phoenix to sell their technology to multiple companies. It was a gigantic sales curve.

Today's BIOS' are much more powerful that the original ones. You can control everything from temperature to hard drive types to standards with today's BIOS. They have become mini-operating systems themselves.