Computer keyboard and mouse question

I use a wireless trackball with this laptop, and the battery seems to last a few months.

in 1998 I didn't think that "Y2K compatible" would ever mean it's old.

BTW, that MB has an AGP slot (never used), once something found only on the newest systems.

No, can't blame Trump for that. He doesn't even use a computer, which tells you a lot about him, how open to learning, to adopting new and best practices, etc. Too bad he learned how to use that damn phone to send tweets.

For a while I thought that USB ports did't work until after Windows started, but PS-2 ports and the larger round ports that preceded them worked before Windows loaded. As soon as the BIOS ran.

Now I think I'm wrong, but was there ever some truth to this?

I dropped a smartphone** and after that the splash screen logo etc. was replaced by a plain green screen with a big totally red and a big totally orange rectangle.

Everything else worked. It's still like that years later. Did I knock a bit out of place?

Since you can boot from a USB drive, I'd say the answer is a definite no.

So what is the difference between mini-DIN and PS/2?

Could you always boot from a USB drive? My BIOS didn't have that option.

It works if the BIOS supports it. That was certainly not forever. The original machines with onboard USB 1 would support a mouse before the drivers loaded but booting a USB drive came about the time of USB 2. With Windows 98SE, you can use a mouse with no problem but you need the driver to run a storage device. There may have been an update that picked that up but it is not on my Latitude lap top.

PSD2 uses one of the variations of MiniDIN. S-Vid uses another variation

Most oftodays computers no longer use a "bios"

That has still become the buzz word for the firmware that turns a bunch of random chips into a computer.

I am thinking the first version of either win 95 or 98 had computers with the USB port,but it would not work. Then there was an update that would load a driver for the USB port.

Could be that win 95B was the first one that even used the usb.

Been a long time, so could be way off.

If not, what takes the place of the BIOS ? Maybe something like it by a different name ? The Microsoft type computers I know of need something in the hardware/firmware to tell the processor how to start up the hard drive to load an operating system of some sort and where the video and key board/mouse is.

Maybe something like the Chrome Book does not use it as such.

I use UEFI on my latest PC, although the MB supports legacy BIOS too. UEFI has advantages. But AFAIK I haven't used them.

They all need some kind of firmware to match each chip set to the instruction set and to establish the environment. This probably traces it back to the IBM 360 system where there was a vast difference in the hardware under the covers of the various models but they all ran the same instruction set because of the firmware loaded. At that time it was called microcode but it had the same function. In fact the ones with reloadable code could actually emulate other types of computer.

He may be referring to UEFI, which is the modernized version of a BIOS, but it's still referred to as a BIOS by the industry and it performs the same function.

PC makers have slowly been replacing BIOS with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). It is basically a "low level operating system"

"Legacy BIOS" is in "emulation mode"