Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?
- ID
- 29328
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Sep 2026, 3:37 AM
- Fetched
- 28 Sep 2026, 10:38 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.quora.com/Did-the-ENIAC-have-a-BIOS/answer/Alan-Kay-11
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 28 Sep 2026, 10:39 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Alan Kay's Quora answer says the ENIAC had neither a BIOS nor anything analogous, and he does not count it as a stored-program computer. He notes that well into the 1960s many computers cold-started with toggles or switches—early DEC machines and the CDC 6600 (ca. 1964–5) dead start panel—while Wikipedia dates the first officially named BIOS to 1975 for CP/M and the modern term to ca. 1981 for the IBM PC, both ROM-based. The Hacker News thread drew 162 points and 51 comments.
Why it matters
No direct impact on Malaysian builders or current AI/agent tooling. If you teach or document boot/firmware concepts, Kay's concrete distinction—ROM-based BIOS names (1975 CP/M, 1981 IBM PC) versus operator-keyed cold starts on early DEC and CDC 6600—is a usable historical example.
Discussion angle
Debate whether 'stored program' and 'BIOS' are anachronistic labels for pre-1970s machines, and whether firmware must be in ROM to count.