When You Turn The Power On

As soon as you turn the computer on the BIOS chips come to life. BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System. The computer has one or more of these ROM (Read Only Memory) chips. The BIOS is the first step in telling the computer who it is. The Central Processing Unit (CPU chip) is the main thinking part of the computer, but so far, it has no thoughts to think about. The BIOS hooks it up to other parts, places where thoughts can be stored. The BIOS tells it how to talk with the disk drives, the RAM (Random Access Memory), the keyboard and the monitor.

The computer wakes up and starts looking around to see what parts it has. It learns how to read input from the keyboard and how to send a picture to the monitor. Then it checks to see how many and what kind of disk drives it has. You see each drive light momentarily flash on.

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