Kind of left out how it all started. The first clones of the IBM PC was really that, clones. They copied the circuitry, component choices and even used a exact copy of the BIOS. They didn't even bother to change the text in the POST screen at first and then just changed the name strings to differentiate themselves. IBM didn't really like this so they brought in their layers and the perfect clones was a thing of the past and a lot of the companies who made them left the market. But those that had made enough money that they wanted to stay in the market now had to design their own computers, and that included the BIOS, and they had to do this "clean room" style. That means they had to start from scratch without looking at or having people involved who had looked at circuit diagrams for the IBM computers they were trying to emulate or having ever disassembled a IBM PC BIOS. This led to computers that no longer were exact copies of IBM computers and as a result no longer perfectly compatible. For years the most important tests made by computer magazines were checking just how compatible a certain model of computer was, and what programs it would and would not run. One of the harder programs to get working just happened to be MS Flight Simulator. Yes the first version is that old, released in 1982. But just because it ran FS didn't mean it would run Wordstar, Lotus 123 or any other of the productivity software of the time. I worked for a manufacturer who was extremely bad at this, so I had hundreds of BIOS versions for their machines, and all of them were flawed. So a customer could end up having to choose a BIOS version to use by what programs it would support, and some times they would have to forgo one or more of them in order that the programs most important to them would work. Companies such as Award, Phoenix and AMI started selling their Clean Room version BIOS to manufacturers. By concentrating on nothing but the software side they were able to create BIOS that was more compatible than the home brew versions of most clone manufacturers. In time the competition intensified and Award started losing market share. AMI took most of the enthusiast and desktop market while Phoenix were quite strong in the server market. Today AMI is the dominant, Award has merged with Phoenix and... I've totally lost track of what I was about to write. Well the reason AMI, Award and Phoenix became dominant in the PC industry is because IBM sacked their legal hounds on the clone manufacturers, and it turned out that in the early years the BIOS was such an important part. Every I/O call went through the BIOS. Read a sector on the floppy? Call the BIOS I/O routine. Read the keyboard? Call the BIOS. print a char on screen? Call the BIOS. Remember BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. Today it's mostly used to provide a way to load the boot loader and configure the chipset options. Once the OS has been loaded all the I/O is taken care of by drivers or routines baked into the kernel. Very little I/O is handled through the BIOS at that time. But back in the days of DOS and early windows the BIOS did just about everything. So a buggy BIOS could really make or break a PC.
I was going to post something similar to this. Born in the 80s, I grew up around a lot of IBM'rs and I heard this story from their side of it. Their side of it is the same as your's only with some extra poking fun at them for having to try and clone what IBM was doing. Needless to say when IBM started the mass layoffs they were not laughing as much. lol
About half way through I decided to scan to the end to make sure I didn't find an Undertaker meme and was relieved. This was really interesting, thanks for your comment.
@@gwgux It's easy to poke fun on it now after, from both sides, but I think that without the "Clone Wars" the PC platform wouldn't exist. At the time there were still a lot of proprietary systems that if you were lucky could run some CPM software. The cheap clones helped build a strong market segment that not even the IBM muscles would have been able to establish. Thing is that the PC wasn't ever intended to be the end all in personal computers. IBM didn't really want to have any personal computers if they got to choose. To them it was initially a universal terminal with expansion slots for the interface cards needed to talk to all kinds of systems. Then some idiot wrote a calc software that ran on the terminal and suddenly you had a computer... We could probably had a better platform today if IBM had stomped hard on the first clone built, but we can only speculate. For what it was it's quite impressive how flexible it turned out to be. Those expansion slots really got worked hard the first 20 years or so. All there used to be on the MB in the way of IO was a keyboard port. Everything else came as expansion cards. Today most of us only have a graphics card, if we're prepared to pay way to much money just to play games or actually get payed enough for work done to offset the cost of a high performance graphics card for said work.
Was this in Norcross? I dumpster dived at the AMI office there like crazy back in the early '00s around the time of the LSI merger. Found all kinds of nice weird prototype MegaRAID SCSI RAID controllers and all kinds of other stuff that we sold on eBay and paid for rent. Had to dry some of them out from the rain lol. Used to be able to find all kinds of crazy stuff along Jimmy Carter Blvd. until Georgia started requiring e-waste to be handled separately.
@@deViant14 The thing with these pronunciations is that as an acronym there isn't an established rule and there are no authorities on it. Sometimes creators try to be but they're the kind of dweebs that expect people that call their code stupid things like "sexy" or "jif" so everyone with an ounce of sense completely ignores them and/or just reads it off the screen.
@@ffwast true. Jif is like a personality test for how much you will listen to authority in spite of popular opinion. Like Hasan made sure to use jif because the creator said so and a few journalists repeated it. But the creator is wrong. I never considered this pronunciation of BIOS because if you had a series of biographies--bios--you would know how to pronounce this.
I remember when I first got into computers I was curious who AMI was and found out that not only were they HQ'd in the state I live in, but the office was 30 seconds down the road from my house.
It's interesting that a single company can control so much market share but fly completely under the radar in terms of anti-trust legislation. It'd be interesting to know how many more companies command such a tremendous market share by staying inside a similar stage of the supply chain.
With the sleep setting on my monitor, I almost never see the BIOS screen anymore, but this really brings back some memories of my early computer days. Turn on the CRT monitor, switch the computer on (actual switch, not a pushbutton thing), and the memory test would pop up as the hard drive started spooling up. The floppy drive would click and buzz, then the logo and a single beep while DOS was loaded. Back when 33mhz was decent for a home PC.
@@Dukenukem Oh thanks, I was trying to think of the 3rd supplier, couldn't remember the name, and didn't know they'd been eaten up by phoenix. Their bioses were always very threadbare. If you saw their name at the top, you knew there'd be nothing of interest in the BIOS settings.
I can't think about American Megatrends without laughing about how for some time last year they were shipping enterprise products with "American MegatrAnds" printed on them and they didn't notice until ServeTheHome pointed it out.
Especially when your motherboard just flash the new BIOS firmware, lost CMOS power, or you turned on diagnostic boot, theres always the same layout straight from the 90s
What’s weird is I’ve never seen this before. I don’t know if I just don’t see it because my monitor doesn’t come out of sleep in time, but I have never had this show up on my pc.
The default configuration in BIOSes is to show the motherboard/builder logo screen rather than the text screen where the AMI stuff is shown, so unless something goes wrong on boot and you end on the forced "press F1 to enter BIOS" you'd never see it.
@@Max_Mustermann Award Software International merged with Phoenix Technologies in 1998, as of 2008 there is no longer the classic AwardBIOS by Energy Star since it is now an Phoenix product.
@@CrackManT Ah, OK. Thanks for the info. I remembered Award BIOS being popular not that long ago, but I have been mostly using laptops exclusively for quite some time now.
In the late 90s and turn of the century another common name in BIOSes was Award, and in the mid-80s another common name was Quadtel - these both got eaten up by Phoenix. I think the only clone manufacturer that went it fully themselves was Compaq.
My First PC from 2005 (when I was just 3 years old) had the Award BIOS with the classic "Energy Star" logo, which btw, even after the Phoenix Tech emerge they're still using it even today (with some graphical difference possibly). However, these days, my PC has AMI BIOS due to a motherboard replacement.
Phoenix UEFI/BIOS are now usually seen in laptops. I don't know why they stopped making desktop motherboard firmware after they acquire Award Software.
@@jasonaquino9534 They still made motherboard bios(long after they bought award in 1998, but I think they aware that,their position and PC market is too narrow for them to earn money.
@@AAA839 I guess, they started to rely more on laptop BIOS/UEFI firmware than desktops in late 2007 as I remember seeing Phoenix Software logo on a Windows Vista era Toshiba laptop.
Until 1998 we also had AWARD bios, which most of my computers had. AMI was an outlier, at least in Europe. I remember my friends rolling their eyes once when we entered setup on a machine and discovered it was AMI
American Megatrends motherboards were used by ADAC Laboratories (at one time the #1 Nuclear Imaging Camera manufacturer in the world) in their data acquisition computer. Excellent hardware and very configurable for the time.
A very easy to understand what American Megatrends is : It's the Bios Original Equipment Manufacture like SeaSonic is one of the Power Supply Original Equipment Manufactures.
I've been to their office, they got all sorts of things hanging around, including a sort of mini museum of hardware from various times in tech history.
Man I totally take that for granted after all these decades of building and booting up the PCs heheheh This sure got me going down memory lane of earlier computing techs
What about Energy Star? I used to see their logo everywhere in the 80-90s. Their boot sequence with a table listing the drives and ports had me all confused each boot.
AMI bioses have come a long way since the extremely simple ones we had on 286 systems in the 1980s. For a while it seemed liked they disappeared and Award become all the rage
are M1 still UEFI-based? ISTR Apple may have been one of the few companies directly maintaining their own UEFI for x86 macbooks, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they contracted some of the work out to AMI with special licensing terms so you never see the AMI logo on macbooks.
I remember when most of my family and friends used PCs that had Award bioses. I wonder what happened to them, you should do a video about it! I live in the area and had a friend growing up whose dad worked there, but I haven't talked to them since middle school
Wow, has it really been since 1998? Blue and yellow BIOS menus are ingrained in my brain. AMI's always had visually flashy interfaces (mouse driven even in the 90s), but Award is what I always think of.
@@MrGencyExit64 Yea that blue logo is still burned in my brain because my frst 3 PCs had Award branded BIOSes, even though they all were made with parts that came out after they had been acquired. idk what my first board was, i didn't build that system, but my Abit IS7 (pentium 4 Northwood) and my EVGA nForce 4 ultra S939 board both had Award BIOSes to my memory. I don't think I saw anything else until around when POST splash screens started becoming common in BIOSes, not long before UEFI became ubiquitous
You can look at coreboot. Coreboot bios is open source so you can learn code there but as far as I know it is under GPL so keep in mind terms of this license.
I always preferred Award BIOS myself as it felt a bit more flexible and consistent across the board. It's just about impossible to find anything newer than socket 1155 that has an Award BIOS. I think now that just about all new motherboards have UEFI, they've pretty much all switched to AMI who seems to be a premier when it comes to that type of BIOS.
Great piece. First computer I ever built in 11/92 was a 486 with an AMI BIOS. I was always partial to them, with Award being my least favorite. I wonder what ever happened to Award...
If you go with System76 you get a Coreboot firmware, just as you do with a Chromebook. Also, Apple does their own firmware. So it's not only AMI and Phoenix, tho close to it.
Probably backwards compatibility. Just in case someone wants to use their 20+ year old 4:3 monitor that's been collecting dust in the closet since the mid 2000s.
Probably because the baseline standard for video signal technology is still VGA, and those cables are analog and support (at best) a 2048×1536 resolution - which is still only 4:3, and you need rather fancy high end cables to do so, it's much more common to see these things top out at 1280×1024 before you get massive signal noise. Since the BIOS is generic base software intended to work with all hardware, they probably need to stay with this old aspect ration until such times as no one ever builds any motherboards with VGA connectors anymore.
The reason is because there are no drivers built into BIOS, so the CPU doesn't know how to operate your specific GPU to render on your specific screen. Thus, it uses a standard that will work 100% of the time.
@@bigshrekhorner for older BIOS it understandable (it used only text mode), but modern UEFI has plenty of space and some do support wide-screen, but IDK why it's not a standard
Basically because the 80*25 text mode is as old as the PC itself. The original MDA and CGA cards both supported it, as has everything since in the interests of backwards compatibility. If there's a graphics card present at all, it's available, so it's a safe default for the BIOS to use.
Probably worth mentioning that AMI and Phoenix both started out cloning the original IBM PC BIOS. Back in those days, that was the secret sauce to get a PC Clone. IBM used mostly off-the-shelf parts, but without the BIOS they were useless. So these companies made BIOS that cloned the functionality of the IBM PC BIOS, but did so in ways that didn't violate IBM's copyright.
I remember 20ish years ago there were at least 3 mayor bios in the market, at least I remember you must know what bios you had to look the correct code sheet for beep codes on POST fault. I don't remember who the other two were though... 😅
I have only seen Award on crapy MBOs, like Gigabyte. Nice boards use AMI, like ASUS, ASRock etc. Award design (classic BIOS) is so crapy, compared to AMI tab-like structure.
@@Valnjes yeah gigabyte is generally bad ASRock and Asus generally good. Nice mindset... You want to explain me next that Intel and Nvidia are and were *always* superior to AMD??? Come on man don't be such a brand suck up 🙄
@@AtomskTheGreat well I'll be damned... then why do I still see the award logo regularly even on fairly new mobos? Or is that the very best kind of a fusion those which most people don't really notice (because nothing really changes for the customer or the products) until monopoly is played to the end? For real I'm annoyed af hearing the words "fusion" or "aquisition" 10 times a year lately... Seems like evil corp from Mr Robot is not that far fetched after all....
I just got curious about this the other day after seeing the logo for the millionth time over these decades and realized their HQ is lacking distance from me. So cool!
I was always a Phoenix kinda guy, was surprised and disappointed when AMI outlived everyone else as they probably had my least favourite BIOS's. Back in the day when you spent more time having to interface with them more than you do now.
Nice video. I still have the first IBM compatible I assembled. It has a motherboard that was manufactured by AMI. An "AMI Mark II 386". The motherboard is silk screened "American Megatrends, Inc. (c) 1988" and etched with "386-AT SERIES-14 REV F4". Still have original manuals. I bought it rather than some other clone because I thought it would be the most standard I could get. Last year I found the exact model on eBay and repaired it, so now I have two.
OMG D Ellis, you said the word clone...last week I talked about my first clone to my kids and they looked at me wondering what movie I was talking about... Love the old days of the greyish / beige boxes.... and when a 28.8 kbps modem was blazing fast.
This was interesting, when I first powered on my asus motherboard when I rebuilt my pc my dad was shocked that American megatrends was the bios, because he used to build pc’s most likely with the ami bios in the motherboards.
There's no off-brand wifi 6 cards? It's not something manufacturer can easily/cheaply pull off -- all of them are going to use branded module underneath. If I search for "pcie wifi 6" on Amazon most products are ax200/ax210 based (which are complete WiFi modules from Intel, so the off brand parts are (likely passive) pcie adapter and antennas).
@@JeffDeWitt Fax machines are exactly the same as Modems, Yeah they still technically turn a digital data stream into audio waves for the phone system but for different purposes (Fax=Documents, Modem=Data Transfer)
I feel like it would be really easy to make a convincing conspiracy theory that AMI are actually just a front for the CIA or something, and that by producing the interface between hardware and software, the CIA now have access to everyone's computer based data lmao
been on the pc scene since 1994. American Megatrends and Texas Instruments were burnt into my retinas right from the start. heh i like that you even thought of something like this for a quickie video.
I live in Brazil and have never personally seen this American Megatrends logo on a boot. That's why I always wondered what it was, always showing up on american tech UA-cam videos
used to like the days of people writing custom BIOS for boards that had known features that had just not been added like overclocking an voltage an multiplyer
That's actually the design brief behind EFI, and to some extent ACPI. Functions in EFI are often written in a portable FORTH. The interpreter still needs some hardware specific native code, though.
@@capability-snob Who told you EFI uses FORTH ? Seems like an out-of-place technology for a BIOS interface based on Windows file formats like PE EXE files, FAT partitions and possibly OLE structured storage.
There is a bytecode defined by the UEFI spec for expansion ROMs on add-in cards, but it's not commonly used AFAIK. You might be thinking of OpenFirmware which used FORTH and could run compiled "Fcode" from expansion ROMs? This was what was on mac-specific PCI cards back in the PPC days.
I remember Award being very big in the past before AMI. Award BIOS'es where very detailed and you could tweak a lot of stuff in them. Award was being used by MSI until like second gen core CPU's, somewhere around 2012 I believe.
Yeah!! Due to the fall in the stock market, I don't think it's advisable holding, it would be more beneficial and yield more profit if you actually trade on cryptocurrency I've been trading since the dip, and I've made so much profit trading.
@@ambitiousadventure1791 that's why you need the help of a professional like Mr Edward Martin's who trade and understand the market more to earn good income, these professionals understand the market like it's there own farm and make s maximum profit for investors.
A story about the history of the BIOS would be interesting. It dates back to the very early days of the personal computer, before IBM came out with the PC. As I recall the story Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research invented the BIOS as an easy way to enable the CP/M operating system to be used on different systems without having to be customized.
For those of you remembering the Award BIOS (or Energy Star), it was very common in the late 90's and early 2000's, before being obtained by Phoenix and going on the decline. But the Award branding is still used on the latest version of their BIOS.
Phoenix technologies is way older than Amibios, and one of the first along with Compaq by recreating the original IBM bios (via the “clean room). But since early 90s (not 2000s) gained a huge market share. I still keep my 1990’s 386 and 1994 486DX2 both with amibios mobo.
I remember when my father had a custom computer built back in the 486sx Packard Bell days (25-30 years ago?) and seeing that American Megatrends tag during its boot up. Thinking at the time it was some generic motherboard but then repeatedly seeing it throughout the subsequent years made me realize it was a seriously huge company.
I actually had an AMI motherboard back in the day. Another company that's been around forever in the PC industry but has completely changed its business model is Supermicro, which used to make consumer-level motherboards, but has exited that space.
One of those things that I've always wondered, but never bothered looking up. Thanks for the info!
ua-cam.com/video/BkTj2ZOZbws/v-deo.html
Fax yes :)
@sitiy"8" absolutely me too
I did it once, because my computer doesn't have this on his starting screen and I thought my computer was broken.
Same
Same
Kind of left out how it all started.
The first clones of the IBM PC was really that, clones. They copied the circuitry, component choices and even used a exact copy of the BIOS. They didn't even bother to change the text in the POST screen at first and then just changed the name strings to differentiate themselves.
IBM didn't really like this so they brought in their layers and the perfect clones was a thing of the past and a lot of the companies who made them left the market.
But those that had made enough money that they wanted to stay in the market now had to design their own computers, and that included the BIOS, and they had to do this "clean room" style. That means they had to start from scratch without looking at or having people involved who had looked at circuit diagrams for the IBM computers they were trying to emulate or having ever disassembled a IBM PC BIOS.
This led to computers that no longer were exact copies of IBM computers and as a result no longer perfectly compatible. For years the most important tests made by computer magazines were checking just how compatible a certain model of computer was, and what programs it would and would not run. One of the harder programs to get working just happened to be MS Flight Simulator. Yes the first version is that old, released in 1982. But just because it ran FS didn't mean it would run Wordstar, Lotus 123 or any other of the productivity software of the time.
I worked for a manufacturer who was extremely bad at this, so I had hundreds of BIOS versions for their machines, and all of them were flawed. So a customer could end up having to choose a BIOS version to use by what programs it would support, and some times they would have to forgo one or more of them in order that the programs most important to them would work.
Companies such as Award, Phoenix and AMI started selling their Clean Room version BIOS to manufacturers. By concentrating on nothing but the software side they were able to create BIOS that was more compatible than the home brew versions of most clone manufacturers. In time the competition intensified and Award started losing market share. AMI took most of the enthusiast and desktop market while Phoenix were quite strong in the server market. Today AMI is the dominant, Award has merged with Phoenix and... I've totally lost track of what I was about to write.
Well the reason AMI, Award and Phoenix became dominant in the PC industry is because IBM sacked their legal hounds on the clone manufacturers, and it turned out that in the early years the BIOS was such an important part. Every I/O call went through the BIOS. Read a sector on the floppy? Call the BIOS I/O routine. Read the keyboard? Call the BIOS. print a char on screen? Call the BIOS. Remember BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. Today it's mostly used to provide a way to load the boot loader and configure the chipset options. Once the OS has been loaded all the I/O is taken care of by drivers or routines baked into the kernel. Very little I/O is handled through the BIOS at that time. But back in the days of DOS and early windows the BIOS did just about everything. So a buggy BIOS could really make or break a PC.
Thanks for the amazing insight. @LTT - Please pin this comment.
I was going to post something similar to this. Born in the 80s, I grew up around a lot of IBM'rs and I heard this story from their side of it. Their side of it is the same as your's only with some extra poking fun at them for having to try and clone what IBM was doing. Needless to say when IBM started the mass layoffs they were not laughing as much. lol
This comment should be pinned.
About half way through I decided to scan to the end to make sure I didn't find an Undertaker meme and was relieved. This was really interesting, thanks for your comment.
@@gwgux It's easy to poke fun on it now after, from both sides, but I think that without the "Clone Wars" the PC platform wouldn't exist.
At the time there were still a lot of proprietary systems that if you were lucky could run some CPM software. The cheap clones helped build a strong market segment that not even the IBM muscles would have been able to establish.
Thing is that the PC wasn't ever intended to be the end all in personal computers. IBM didn't really want to have any personal computers if they got to choose. To them it was initially a universal terminal with expansion slots for the interface cards needed to talk to all kinds of systems. Then some idiot wrote a calc software that ran on the terminal and suddenly you had a computer...
We could probably had a better platform today if IBM had stomped hard on the first clone built, but we can only speculate. For what it was it's quite impressive how flexible it turned out to be. Those expansion slots really got worked hard the first 20 years or so. All there used to be on the MB in the way of IO was a keyboard port. Everything else came as expansion cards.
Today most of us only have a graphics card, if we're prepared to pay way to much money just to play games or actually get payed enough for work done to offset the cost of a high performance graphics card for said work.
My dad and aunt used to work at an American Megatrends facility in Georgia for 15 years. I remember running around the place as a kid back in the 90s.
Oh wow!!
Small world, I currently work at the Duluth office
That Georgia facility is their headquarters not far from Duluth city
Was this in Norcross? I dumpster dived at the AMI office there like crazy back in the early '00s around the time of the LSI merger. Found all kinds of nice weird prototype MegaRAID SCSI RAID controllers and all kinds of other stuff that we sold on eBay and paid for rent. Had to dry some of them out from the rain lol. Used to be able to find all kinds of crazy stuff along Jimmy Carter Blvd. until Georgia started requiring e-waste to be handled separately.
Did you have to press DEL to enter into different rooms?
Well this was a surprise. I actually work at AMI and always get a kick out of seeing our splash screens in Linus's videos.
Recently joined AMI India. Very cool to work in a company whose logo flashes first in almost every computer.
@@deepakgodhia4415 whats a computer
@@JamezMartinez this feels like a shitty joke
@@liamrogers9905 Must be a troll.
@@JamezMartinez that thing that fell on Izzac Einstwin's head when he was sitting over a tree and allowed him to invent the movie Gravity
James is great on Techquickie, and he always seems to speak with confidence.
He confidently says biOHs as biAWWs which is great
@@deViant14 Both are valid ways to pronounce it.
@@deViant14 The thing with these pronunciations is that as an acronym there isn't an established rule and there are no authorities on it. Sometimes creators try to be but they're the kind of dweebs that expect people that call their code stupid things like "sexy" or "jif" so everyone with an ounce of sense completely ignores them and/or just reads it off the screen.
@@ffwast true. Jif is like a personality test for how much you will listen to authority in spite of popular opinion. Like Hasan made sure to use jif because the creator said so and a few journalists repeated it. But the creator is wrong. I never considered this pronunciation of BIOS because if you had a series of biographies--bios--you would know how to pronounce this.
@@deViant14 Actually you'd be applying the rules of a truncation of a word that just looks similar to the acronym.
I immediately clicked this video. For the longest time I’ve been too lazy to look into American Megatrends. This is fantastic, thank you!
I always forgot about the name to search.
Same here I Immediately Clicked This Video Because I Want to Know About "American Megatrends" Bios Logo and They Showed up On My Mother Board?!
Endesga omg
True
I remember when I first got into computers I was curious who AMI was and found out that not only were they HQ'd in the state I live in, but the office was 30 seconds down the road from my house.
Excellent video guys! An interesting look into something we’ve all seen but don’t really know about
It's interesting that a single company can control so much market share but fly completely under the radar in terms of anti-trust legislation. It'd be interesting to know how many more companies command such a tremendous market share by staying inside a similar stage of the supply chain.
Food is owned by 5 companies in america
Little wonder. Since they aren't doing anything shitty, they don't draw attention.
@@nifa7231 holy mother of thots. What.
@@maxlangley8478 report the spam bots 😂
@Grayson Peddie when you report them I believe they just disappear for you at least until youtube pretends to do something about it
With the sleep setting on my monitor, I almost never see the BIOS screen anymore, but this really brings back some memories of my early computer days. Turn on the CRT monitor, switch the computer on (actual switch, not a pushbutton thing), and the memory test would pop up as the hard drive started spooling up. The floppy drive would click and buzz, then the logo and a single beep while DOS was loaded.
Back when 33mhz was decent for a home PC.
Never saw American Megatrends at all. What I always remember, though, was that "Energy⭐" logo.
that would be probably Award BIOS (now merged into Phoenix)
@@Dukenukem Oh thanks, I was trying to think of the 3rd supplier, couldn't remember the name, and didn't know they'd been eaten up by phoenix. Their bioses were always very threadbare. If you saw their name at the top, you knew there'd be nothing of interest in the BIOS settings.
Yeah me too only my Asus mono has AMI bios
@@Dukenukem Award was my favorite of them all.
@@aaardvaaark i have a Gigabyte mobo with Phoenix and its' actually very configurable.
Always wanted to know
But never bothered to Google right
The more you know
@@BrowncoatInABox Google is for nerds.
This is one of my favourite AMI commercials I've ever seen. Congrats AMI, you're totally killing the ad game.
I remember when Award was a huge player too. Almost any PC I came across had about a 50/50 chance of being Award or AMI, if I'm remembering correctly.
Yupp, in the 2000-2010 Awards was a bigger player than AMI in PC Bios market. They are still in the game, known as Phoenix Award.
There is also Phoenix (who bought Award) and Insyde (though I haven't ever seen one personally).
I love how confident and optimistic AMI were in naming their company
I can't think about American Megatrends without laughing about how for some time last year they were shipping enterprise products with "American MegatrAnds" printed on them and they didn't notice until ServeTheHome pointed it out.
@sweet home 4 ma'amm this is a school zone
"Death Stranding: American Megastrands by Kojima Productions"
@@bonsai_chaos oh f*ck i can't stop laughing
You know I was gonna get around to googling this after seeing it so many times. I swear though that screen looks the same as it did on windows 98.
Especially when your motherboard just flash the new BIOS firmware, lost CMOS power, or you turned on diagnostic boot, theres always the same layout straight from the 90s
You mean Windows 95?
Thats because its all the same crap, its just looks prettier now and full of bloat.
@@atodaso1668 bloat?
@@ArunG273 extra crap that you don't need
What’s weird is I’ve never seen this before. I don’t know if I just don’t see it because my monitor doesn’t come out of sleep in time, but I have never had this show up on my pc.
I've always been curious about why I see this screen on like every pc video, but I've never seen it on my own system
same, your board probably hides it though
The default configuration in BIOSes is to show the motherboard/builder logo screen rather than the text screen where the AMI stuff is shown, so unless something goes wrong on boot and you end on the forced "press F1 to enter BIOS" you'd never see it.
@@junethefirst well usually you'll see it on first boot or hardware changes I'd assume or a CMOS reset
motherboard manufacturers replace it with their own. Especially in laptops
@@junethefirst If you disable the manufacturer logo on startup in the bios(like the UGLY asus tuf logo), the AMI logo replace it
They used to make motherboards also. I believe my first computer, a 486 33Mhz, had an American Megatrends motherboard.
Either American megatrends, Insyde, or phoenix BIOS, the big three
indeed
+ Award Software
@@Max_Mustermann Award Software International merged with Phoenix Technologies in 1998, as of 2008 there is no longer the classic AwardBIOS by Energy Star since it is now an Phoenix product.
@@CrackManT Ah, OK. Thanks for the info. I remembered Award BIOS being popular not that long ago, but I have been mostly using laptops exclusively for quite some time now.
the real monopoly we need to fight
In the late 90s and turn of the century another common name in BIOSes was Award, and in the mid-80s another common name was Quadtel - these both got eaten up by Phoenix. I think the only clone manufacturer that went it fully themselves was Compaq.
Oh man I forgot about Award, my Athlon x2 Windows XP machine had/has an Award board.
There is still an old All-in-one PC with windows XP in my grandmother's house. It was so bad
I liked AWARD BIOS more. It haven't encountered it on fairly modern machines for quite long though.
@@k4be. Yeah, newest machine I had with AwardBIOS was built in 2009.
Now this is a techquickie video! An explainer! Not an unboxing or something from the main channel. Please keep it this way! 👌
My First PC from 2005 (when I was just 3 years old) had the Award BIOS with the classic "Energy Star" logo, which btw, even after the Phoenix Tech emerge they're still using it even today (with some graphical difference possibly). However, these days, my PC has AMI BIOS due to a motherboard replacement.
😂
Phoenix UEFI/BIOS are now usually seen in laptops. I don't know why they stopped making desktop motherboard firmware after they acquire Award Software.
@@jasonaquino9534 They still made motherboard bios(long after they bought award in 1998, but I think they aware that,their position and PC market is too narrow for them to earn money.
@@AAA839 I guess, they started to rely more on laptop BIOS/UEFI firmware than desktops in late 2007 as I remember seeing Phoenix Software logo on a Windows Vista era Toshiba laptop.
Until 1998 we also had AWARD bios, which most of my computers had. AMI was an outlier, at least in Europe. I remember my friends rolling their eyes once when we entered setup on a machine and discovered it was AMI
As many others in the comments, I always wondered, what was American Megatrends, and finally we have got the information!
Thanks for the video!
For info: there was Award Software, but they merged with Phoenix in 1998.
@@elliehayden4119 Scam bot
American Megatrends motherboards were used by ADAC Laboratories (at one time the #1 Nuclear Imaging Camera manufacturer in the world) in their data acquisition computer. Excellent hardware and very configurable for the time.
Excellent hardware, better monopoly…
Finally, answering the questions we all have.
A very easy to understand what American Megatrends is : It's the Bios Original Equipment Manufacture like SeaSonic is one of the Power Supply Original Equipment Manufactures.
Aka, A monopoly
I've been to their office, they got all sorts of things hanging around, including a sort of mini museum of hardware from various times in tech history.
Been seeing them for so long I've basically tuned them out and stopped noticing. Thanks for this.
Man I totally take that for granted after all these decades of building and booting up the PCs heheheh This sure got me going down memory lane of earlier computing techs
Before AMI we used Phoenix BIOS and then Award and AMI. Ahhhh, the good (bad) old days.
Would have been nice to mention the coreboot project.
Would be nice, but it would make asking AMI for help with the video rather awkward.
AFAIK coreboot is a lil wonky on modern hardware
Straight up to "best video ever" compilation. The fact that you just made it fit in 4min is awesome!
What about Energy Star? I used to see their logo everywhere in the 80-90s. Their boot sequence with a table listing the drives and ports had me all confused each boot.
Good idea for a Tech Quicky Video.
Energy star? The energy efficiency standard set by the EPA?
literally still have an energy star sticker on my laptop right now
Award bios had the energy star logo. Phoenix technologies merged with Award in 1998.
The "Energy Star" logo POST is from Award BIOS, which in 1998 they emerged with Phoenix Technologies.
I'm the guy who prays when I update the bios...
There is also "Coreboot". Though not widely supported, but more secure and opensource.
That DOS-style screen is rarely seen anymore lol
This is a video I’ve always wanted to see
"Without AMI, you can't compute."
Oi, is that threat?
AMI bioses have come a long way since the extremely simple ones we had on 286 systems in the 1980s. For a while it seemed liked they disappeared and Award become all the rage
I legitimately was think about this yesterday, and then this video came out.
"You cannot compute without AMI." Pretty sure FOSS alternatives like CoreBoot would beg to differ.
But dies coreboot provide the full API used by other bootable software, or only their FOSS friends?
"without AMI you can't compute"
me with a MacBook: I'm 4 parallel universes ahead of you
are M1 still UEFI-based? ISTR Apple may have been one of the few companies directly maintaining their own UEFI for x86 macbooks, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they contracted some of the work out to AMI with special licensing terms so you never see the AMI logo on macbooks.
I remember when most of my family and friends used PCs that had Award bioses. I wonder what happened to them, you should do a video about it! I live in the area and had a friend growing up whose dad worked there, but I haven't talked to them since middle school
Award and Phoenix merged yeah.
Wow, has it really been since 1998? Blue and yellow BIOS menus are ingrained in my brain. AMI's always had visually flashy interfaces (mouse driven even in the 90s), but Award is what I always think of.
@@MrGencyExit64 Yea that blue logo is still burned in my brain because my frst 3 PCs had Award branded BIOSes, even though they all were made with parts that came out after they had been acquired. idk what my first board was, i didn't build that system, but my Abit IS7 (pentium 4 Northwood) and my EVGA nForce 4 ultra S939 board both had Award BIOSes to my memory. I don't think I saw anything else until around when POST splash screens started becoming common in BIOSes, not long before UEFI became ubiquitous
Came here to comment similar - thanks!
Please correct that to: "that settings program you can access before your computer boots into LINUX" of course!
Do one on different printer technologies please :)
it's not super quick (nor a video) but @foone on twitter has a thread on printer technologies
@@ashlyy1341 foone is amazing, highly recommend giving them a follow
Learning to write BIOSes from scratch is a Key thing. Being able to write a whole bios yourself for your pc would be amazing.
You can look at coreboot. Coreboot bios is open source so you can learn code there but as far as I know it is under GPL so keep in mind terms of this license.
It's a company
thanks 👍
What the Heck is "American Megatrands".
Their royalty stickers can be found in Dell EMC switches and HPE Cray supercomputers.
I always preferred Award BIOS myself as it felt a bit more flexible and consistent across the board. It's just about impossible to find anything newer than socket 1155 that has an Award BIOS. I think now that just about all new motherboards have UEFI, they've pretty much all switched to AMI who seems to be a premier when it comes to that type of BIOS.
I literally just googled this yesterday out of curiosity for the company behind every first booting up.
Great piece. First computer I ever built in 11/92 was a 486 with an AMI BIOS. I was always partial to them, with Award being my least favorite. I wonder what ever happened to Award...
Award merged with Phoenix
@@android-user Thanks!
@@BollingHolt I droped you a link, but it got deleted
@@android-user ... yet a spam smut post got through the filters LOL
Future video: Why does Nuance dominate speech recognition market for computers?
Few years ago I was curious about American megatrends and Googled and found to be invented by Indian Americans
Anyone else pick on James saying Bye-Oh-S at least 3 times? We're beating them down!
If you go with System76 you get a Coreboot firmware, just as you do with a Chromebook. Also, Apple does their own firmware. So it's not only AMI and Phoenix, tho close to it.
Props for actually getting in touch with them!
Always wondered why BIOS/UEFI default to 4:3 aspect ratio even way after wide-screen became the standard
Probably backwards compatibility. Just in case someone wants to use their 20+ year old 4:3 monitor that's been collecting dust in the closet since the mid 2000s.
Probably because the baseline standard for video signal technology is still VGA, and those cables are analog and support (at best) a 2048×1536 resolution - which is still only 4:3, and you need rather fancy high end cables to do so, it's much more common to see these things top out at 1280×1024 before you get massive signal noise.
Since the BIOS is generic base software intended to work with all hardware, they probably need to stay with this old aspect ration until such times as no one ever builds any motherboards with VGA connectors anymore.
The reason is because there are no drivers built into BIOS, so the CPU doesn't know how to operate your specific GPU to render on your specific screen. Thus, it uses a standard that will work 100% of the time.
@@bigshrekhorner for older BIOS it understandable (it used only text mode), but modern UEFI has plenty of space and some do support wide-screen, but IDK why it's not a standard
Basically because the 80*25 text mode is as old as the PC itself. The original MDA and CGA cards both supported it, as has everything since in the interests of backwards compatibility. If there's a graphics card present at all, it's available, so it's a safe default for the BIOS to use.
Probably worth mentioning that AMI and Phoenix both started out cloning the original IBM PC BIOS. Back in those days, that was the secret sauce to get a PC Clone. IBM used mostly off-the-shelf parts, but without the BIOS they were useless. So these companies made BIOS that cloned the functionality of the IBM PC BIOS, but did so in ways that didn't violate IBM's copyright.
I remember 20ish years ago there were at least 3 mayor bios in the market, at least I remember you must know what bios you had to look the correct code sheet for beep codes on POST fault.
I don't remember who the other two were though... 😅
Phoenix is one
Phoenix and Award?
@@martijnvds yes
@@martijnvds And of cause the original IBM BIOS if you bought their hardware.
That yellow star is absolutely iconic. I fondly remember being greeted with it every time I booted my Windows 95 machine. Good times.
You forgot award bioses. They are (or at least were a few years ago) also very widespread.
Award bios gang rise up
award merged with phoenix two decades ago. and phoenix he mentioned.
I have only seen Award on crapy MBOs, like Gigabyte. Nice boards use AMI, like ASUS, ASRock etc.
Award design (classic BIOS) is so crapy, compared to AMI tab-like structure.
@@Valnjes yeah gigabyte is generally bad ASRock and Asus generally good. Nice mindset... You want to explain me next that Intel and Nvidia are and were *always* superior to AMD???
Come on man don't be such a brand suck up 🙄
@@AtomskTheGreat well I'll be damned... then why do I still see the award logo regularly even on fairly new mobos? Or is that the very best kind of a fusion those which most people don't really notice (because nothing really changes for the customer or the products) until monopoly is played to the end?
For real I'm annoyed af hearing the words "fusion" or "aquisition" 10 times a year lately... Seems like evil corp from Mr Robot is not that far fetched after all....
I just got curious about this the other day after seeing the logo for the millionth time over these decades and realized their HQ is lacking distance from me. So cool!
I was always a Phoenix kinda guy, was surprised and disappointed when AMI outlived everyone else as they probably had my least favourite BIOS's. Back in the day when you spent more time having to interface with them more than you do now.
Nice video. I still have the first IBM compatible I assembled. It has a motherboard that was manufactured by AMI. An "AMI Mark II 386". The motherboard is silk screened "American Megatrends, Inc. (c) 1988" and etched with "386-AT SERIES-14 REV F4". Still have original manuals. I bought it rather than some other clone because I thought it would be the most standard I could get. Last year I found the exact model on eBay and repaired it, so now I have two.
OMG D Ellis, you said the word clone...last week I talked about my first clone to my kids and they looked at me wondering what movie I was talking about... Love the old days of the greyish / beige boxes.... and when a 28.8 kbps modem was blazing fast.
To be honest this techquickie could've been 32 seconds long, the rest is just what is the BIOS.
This was interesting, when I first powered on my asus motherboard when I rebuilt my pc my dad was shocked that American megatrends was the bios, because he used to build pc’s most likely with the ami bios in the motherboards.
Topic: do off-brand wifi 6 cards on amazon perform per spec?
There's no off-brand wifi 6 cards? It's not something manufacturer can easily/cheaply pull off -- all of them are going to use branded module underneath.
If I search for "pcie wifi 6" on Amazon most products are ax200/ax210 based (which are complete WiFi modules from Intel, so the off brand parts are (likely passive) pcie adapter and antennas).
@@niter43 plus you'll get results mostly from only 2 companies, Intel and RealTek, the later one uses intel's chip underneath iirc
I seem to remember having an American Megatrends catalog in highschool electronics class. It's where we ordered all the components from.
What pro-monopoly school it must have been
Great video. More knowledge, less BS fillers and silly inside jokes 👍👍. LMG should make this video standard across all its channels
One thing you should talk about that might be interesting is Dial Up Modems - How they work and their history
And they are still in common use in fax machines.
@@JeffDeWitt Fax machines are exactly the same as Modems, Yeah they still technically turn a digital data stream into audio waves for the phone system but for different purposes (Fax=Documents, Modem=Data Transfer)
I feel like it would be really easy to make a convincing conspiracy theory that AMI are actually just a front for the CIA or something, and that by producing the interface between hardware and software, the CIA now have access to everyone's computer based data lmao
Intel Management Engine is the CIA's backdoor
Huh, this is something I googled recently because I noticed that even the spot weld inspector unit I have at work has AMI on it. Neat!
Can we blame this guys if we had a bios corrupt issue when updating?
been on the pc scene since 1994. American Megatrends and Texas Instruments were burnt into my retinas right from the start. heh i like that you even thought of something like this for a quickie video.
Question: does the port for laptop keyboard is standardized or every laptop manufacturers has a different spec?
Are you asking if every laptop has the same type of header on the motherboard to plug the keyboard into?
@@drakewaldie Yes
I think its either SPI or I2C
@@Sandeepan What is that?
Simple, low-bandwidth serial interfaces.
The history of BIOS from IBM's original to modern UEFI is a great story -- law suits and all :)
Haha bios go brrr
same lmao
I was thinking day before and the day before yesterday
I live in Brazil and have never personally seen this American Megatrends logo on a boot. That's why I always wondered what it was, always showing up on american tech UA-cam videos
When AMD dies, it will return as Phoenix, with Intel Insyde !
Oh AMI god
I remember having American megatrends show up upon booting up my pc, uncle's old pc and others alongside energy star, nostalgia hit me hard again.
I want to see some European Megatrends or I'll stop computing.
I've always wondered what AMI was. That AMI screen has been on every server I've ever provisioned. Great video 👍
Without AMI you can't compute
Lmao😂😂 one of the chadest claims ever
Pretty american to be proud of their monopoly
used to like the days of people writing custom BIOS for boards that had known features that had just not been added like overclocking an voltage an multiplyer
Imagine a new level of generic BIOSs where swapping out Intel processors for ARM chips could be possible.
That's actually the design brief behind EFI, and to some extent ACPI. Functions in EFI are often written in a portable FORTH. The interpreter still needs some hardware specific native code, though.
@@capability-snob Thanks for all the info 👍
@@capability-snob Who told you EFI uses FORTH ? Seems like an out-of-place technology for a BIOS interface based on Windows file formats like PE EXE files, FAT partitions and possibly OLE structured storage.
There is a bytecode defined by the UEFI spec for expansion ROMs on add-in cards, but it's not commonly used AFAIK. You might be thinking of OpenFirmware which used FORTH and could run compiled "Fcode" from expansion ROMs? This was what was on mac-specific PCI cards back in the PPC days.
I remember Award being very big in the past before AMI. Award BIOS'es where very detailed and you could tweak a lot of stuff in them. Award was being used by MSI until like second gen core CPU's, somewhere around 2012 I believe.
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A story about the history of the BIOS would be interesting. It dates back to the very early days of the personal computer, before IBM came out with the PC. As I recall the story Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research invented the BIOS as an easy way to enable the CP/M operating system to be used on different systems without having to be customized.
It was just their name for the device-driver layer. The other part was called the “BDOS”, which was basically the filesystem layer.
It’s bios not biahs. Learn to say it right. Thanks.
For those of you remembering the Award BIOS (or Energy Star), it was very common in the late 90's and early 2000's, before being obtained by Phoenix and going on the decline. But the Award branding is still used on the latest version of their BIOS.
I've worked in IT for over a decade. Never once looked this up. Thanks
Who remembers Award and Mr.bios. those were the days
Phoenix technologies is way older than Amibios, and one of the first along with Compaq by recreating the original IBM bios (via the “clean room). But since early 90s (not 2000s) gained a huge market share. I still keep my 1990’s 386 and 1994 486DX2 both with amibios mobo.
I remember when my father had a custom computer built back in the 486sx Packard Bell days (25-30 years ago?) and seeing that American Megatrends tag during its boot up. Thinking at the time it was some generic motherboard but then repeatedly seeing it throughout the subsequent years made me realize it was a seriously huge company.
I actually had an AMI motherboard back in the day. Another company that's been around forever in the PC industry but has completely changed its business model is Supermicro, which used to make consumer-level motherboards, but has exited that space.
You guys should've mentioned CoreBoot.