Burgess, Show me your BIOS

Show me your BIOS: technology, biology, and open source media Helen J Burgess

The computer BIOS is the meeting place between hardware and software: the firmware that makes sure the operating system can actually make things happen in the guts of the hardware. Like life itself, BIOS has changed and grown over time, becoming, a variously, a hard swap space; the basic booting mechanism, loading hardware and checking it in sequence; and the regulator of heating, cooling and power flow. It has even spawned little versions of itself onto separate parts of the hardware, like the localized “brains” of our dinosaur cousins. BIOS thus operates a little like life – with a proprietary core. BIOS can stand in as a metaphor for a more general trend/anti-trend in our techno-lives. BIOS is a commercial product, but has spawned an open source movement aimed at providing interopearability beyond the Big Players in the hardware field. Open Source BIOS is, then, a plan for infinite diversity in infinite combinations (of hardware). At the same time, open source and open content movements (and the concurrent rise in “licensing” of creative content, and even “life” itself) are building techno-ecologies of their own. This paper will tease out some of the relationships between life in the field and life in the BIOS.