AwardBIOS

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AwardBIOS (also known as Award Modular BIOS and later known as Phoenix - AwardBIOS after the Phoenix Technologies merge of the company) is a Personal Computer BIOS developed by Award Software in 1984.

Phoenix acquisition

On April 16, 1998, Phoenix Technologies acquired Award Software to create a $100M BIOS firm. It was completed on September 28 of the same year and both companies merged. As a result of the merge, Award Software went bankrupt, while Phoenix survived.


List of known versions

List of known AwardBIOS versions
Version Release date POST screen Notes
AwardBIOS 1.xx 1984? Not available Confirmed existence by a file of a diagnostics program. No ROM files or pictures are available for it as of now.
AwardBIOS 2.xx 1985
AwardBIOS 3.xx 1987 Siemens-Nixdorf fork exists.
AwardBIOS v4.00 1991 Mostly used on motherboards with EISA expansion buses
AwardBIOS v4.20/4.26/4.28/4.32 1992 4.26/4.28/4.32 might have been only used by Gateway 2000/Swan/Anigma.
AwardBIOS v4.50 1993

Not to be confused with EliteBIOS, early versions have blue POST screen while later versions have black EliteBIOS POST screen but with v4.50 version number.
AwardBIOS v4.50xx/v4.51xx/v4.60xx 1994 Codenamed "EliteBIOS".
Award PowerBIOS 1994 Probably considered as AwardBIOS v5.00 by Award.
AwardBIOS v6.00PG 1998

Codenamed "Medallion". ASUS and Gigabyte forks of it exist. A sub-version called WorkstationBIOS also exists.