Will I Be Jailed For Saying “UEFI BIOS”?

To hear some people talk, it is a crime to say “UEFI BIOS”.  No, they insist, there was “BIOS”, which has been supplanted by “UEFI”, or “UEFI firmware”.

You do not have a ‘UEFI BIOS’. No-one has a ‘UEFI BIOS’. Please don’t ever say ‘UEFI BIOS’.

Microsoft, in particular, tries hard to drive home this distinction—that computers today have gotten rid of BIOS and now use UEFI.  The Wikipedia article on UEFI implies something similar.

Is this distinction helpful?  Is it accurate?  The fact of the matter is that from the earliest days of the microcomputer revolution, the mid-to-late 1970s, computers have required a bootstrap firmware program. Following the lead of Gary Kildall’s CP/M, this program was called the BIOS.  IBM introduced their PC in 1981 and continued to use the term BIOS.  Just because the industry has embraced a new standard, UEFI, does not mean that somehow the term “BIOS” refers to something else.  I know from my work experience as a BIOS developer that my colleagues and I use the term “UEFI BIOS”—we used to have Legacy BIOS, now we have UEFI BIOS.  It’s still the system’s bootstrap firmware.

Here’s an article from Darien Graham-Smith of PC Pro introducing UEFI and using the term “UEFI BIOS”:  http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/381565/uefi-bios-explained

Let’s look to the real experts to see what they say—namely, Intel, the originators of the UEFI standard.  Intel dedicated an entire issue of the Intel Technology Journal (Volume 15, Issue 1) to UEFI.  In that journal, the term “UEFI BIOS” was used a total of six times.  Example:

The UEFI BIOS is gaining new capabilities because UEFI lowers the barrier to implementing new ideas that work on every PC.

This edition of the Intel Technology Journal was written by a veritable who’s who of the BIOS industry:  Intel, IBM, HP, AMI, Phoenix Technologies, Lenovo, and Insyde, including some of the Founding Fathers of UEFI:  Vincent Zimmer and Michael Rothman.  If they did not see this term as incorrect, then neither should we.

While the UEFI Spec itself does not appear to use the term “UEFI BIOS”, it does use the term “Legacy BIOS” to refer to the older standard, which to me implies that UEFI is the new, non-legacy BIOS.

Anyway, this question is not likely to become one of the great debates of our time, but I propose that the term “UEFI BIOS” is perfectly acceptable.  Now, on to UEFI BIOS programming!