IBM-PC-BIOS

This is a reconstruction of the original 1981-82 IBM PC BIOS source code using scanning and transcription of the BIOS listings found in the IBM Technical Reference manuals.

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2Mentions

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91GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

This is a reconstruction of the original 1981-82 IBM PC BIOS source code using scanning and transcription of the BIOS listings found in the IBM Technical Reference manuals.

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Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-07-25 21:33:42 UTC to 2025-04-12 23:14:52 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

ndiddy·Apr 12, 2025

Really good article! Personally it has me convinced that the 0x7F character was originally meant to be a delta, but whoever drew it did a poor enough job that it made other teams at IBM think it was supposed to be a house. As the article says, when you look in the PC BIOS source listing, there's a comment saying "DELTA" next to where the bitmap for the 0x7F character is defined. https://github.com/philspil66/IBM-PC-BIOS/blob/main/PCBIOS.A...

In Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

peter_d_sherman·Jul 25, 2022

Related: >"COMPAQ DeskPro 386 Update PCx86 can now boot the COMPAQ DeskPro 386/16 ROM BIOS.": https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/04/16/ >"PCjs uses JavaScript to recreate the IBM PC experience, using original ROMs, CPUs running at their original speeds, and early IBM video cards and monitors... ": https://www.pcjs.org/ >"This is a reconstruction of the IBM PC BIOS source code using scanning and transcription of the BIOS listings found in the IBM Technical Reference manuals.": https://github.com/philspil66/IBM-PC-BIOS

In ROM BIOS for COMPAQ DeskPro 386-16 (2015)