You would have expected greater fanfare for what had once been the most anticipated and advocated agreement in the computing industry.

On a sunny, warm, late April afternoon in Seattle, the three largest computer manufacturers, the three largest core systems software manufacturers, the two primary CPU makers, and the one name that comes to mind with respect to commercial operating systems, came to a common realization. While their visions of the future of computing differed significantly - from a global network of thin desktop clients and massive servers, to a wireless collaborative network of pocket-sized media providers - their agendas all contained one common aspect. They would all replace the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), which for the past 24 years has been the crank-start motor for every x86 computer ever built.

The press missed a symbolic milestone by nearly overlooking the formation of the industry's newest consortium: the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Forum, announced briefly at the end of day one at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). For once, IBM, HP, Dell, American Megatrends (AMI), Phoenix Technologies, Insyde Technologies, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft acknowledged a common interest. In the past, these companies gave presentations projecting phenomenally revolutionary future applications, such as on-board firmware with autonomic, or "self-healing," functionality, or even ideas vastly more fantastic, plucked from science fiction - such as making Windows faster. Their objective has been to intensify public interest in an initiative whose ulterior motive was to unseat the BIOS chip. But after two decades of trying, these companies realized it hasn't worked. So what they intend to do now is coalesce toward achieving the single task that will advance their individual, unique goals.

"We see the point now where the legacy BIOS is finally unable to meet the needs of future operating systems and hardware-based platforms," proclaims Richard Brunner, one of AMD's lead developers of AMD64 architecture. "Legacy BIOS, we think, has persisted for as long as it has due to the prevalence of certain classes of legacy devices. Also, quite honestly, inertia in both the operating system and the BIOS vendors, [along with] the problem that there was not, until recently, any sort of viable alternative with enough industry players behind it. So we think now we've finally reached the point where the most difficult legacy I/O devices are starting to disappear."

"Everybody is agreed on the end itself," states Jonathan Joseph, Executive Vice President of Insyde Technologies , "which is that it's time to replace the BIOS with something modern and something productive. But there are different opinions on exactly what that is."

This is an example of a setup screen from InsydeH2O, which utilizes the EFI 1.1 specification and framework. Here, a technical support page runs within a Web browser embedded in the pre-OS environment, so a customer with a non-booting computer can still access the knowledge base. (Courtesy Insyde Technologies)