A PC goes through a process when it is first turned on: the Power-On Self-Test, or P.O.S.T. Some system boards provide security measures that demand a password before beginning the P.O.S.T. process or allowing the user into the BIOS setup program. The original IBM-PC (1981) did not provide any security measures or a BIOS setup program; all it had was a P.O.S.T. If the user needed to configure a PC, one does it with switches and jumpers. A program to set up the system BIOS and configuration did not come along until the IBM-PC/AT (1984), and it had to be run from a special boot-up diskette.
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