6. Plug and play BIOS

• What is a plug and play BIOS?

  • Prior to Windows 95 the BIOS was responsible for managing all hardware devices such as the floppy and hard disk drives, serial and parallel ports, video and network cards, the keyboard, and system clock.

  • When hardware was added to the system, the user adding the hardware had to set a variety of parameters such as the starting address in memory where the buffers and startup code could be found as well as the interrupt priority level (IRQ) of the device.

  • Windows 95 introduced Plug-and-Play (PnP) BIOS which automates the process of detecting and adding hardware to a system.

  • In addition to making it far easier for the user to add hardware devices -- PnP eliminated hardware conflicts that could cripple the PC.