Bit of CP/M trivia needed

[Tom Jennings]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Brian Knittel wrote:

> Does anybody out there know for certain when the
> term BIOS was coined? I believe it was Gary Kildall,
> and from what I can find, it was around 1978 that
> he abstracted the I/O and localized it in what
> he called the BIOS. Anyone know differently?

"Basic Input Output System" is a bit too generic
for anyone to claim originality.

>
> Also -- was the BIOS stored on the CP/M
> floppy, or was it in ROM/EPROM? If not, how
> did CP/M machines boot?

Though there were many wildly different schemas, CP/M machines
often had the simplest possible boot ROM (PROM, EPROM) because
EPROMs were expensive (and product change rate was very high :-),
that loaded the BIOS, which loaded BDOS.  This is per Digital
Research suggestion.