🚀 go-pugleaf

Stuart Grant wrote in message ...
>> ROM? What modern desktop compuers use ROM?
>> PCs certainly don't.
>>
>Read Only Memory - one of the first technical terms I learned, and
>still a pretty accurate description of what a hard drive does. My
PC's
>still got one of those.
>You call them compuers these days do you? About what I'd expect from
>someone who thinks of other people as entities and refers to them as
>"it".
Um. A hard disk is definately not 'read only', but every PC still uses
ROM, however usually only fairly small 'areas' in other chips. The
memory storing the BIOS, is actually a form of ROM, however it is
electrically eraseable (EEPROM), and usually contains a small area of
'permanent' ROM which allows recovery on some systems if a 'flash' of
the EEPROM fails. The BIOS on the video card is usually in a similar
EEPROM, but often has the basic character generator in permanent
'ROM'. All network cards, have a tiny area of ROM, containing the
cards unique address. The microprocessor itself, contains quite a
large area of ROM, with the microcode that is used to perform may of
th larger instructions, using what is effectively a RISC processor.
PCI cards, usually have a small area of ROM, containing the card ID.
Many of the peripheral cards in a PC, use FPGA gate arrays to perform
their logic, with the configuration stored in yet more ROM's. On hard
disks, the maain 'microcode', is stored in unused areas on the disk
itself, but the code to load this, is in ROM on the drive. The use of
bipolar ROM's, with their huge power consumptions, has largely died,
the commonest variant now, is the EEPROM, but the ROM itself is now
more common than ever, it has just got a lot smaller, and simpler to
reprogram...

Best Wishes