In the past they had jumpers for the same purpose.
IBM ThinkPads could be reset if you beamed a certain radio frequency directly at the BIOS chip. It was documented in the user guide as a feature if you were ever locked out, or the system was no longer booting. It’s been 20 years but I doubt that feature ever went away.
For a while vendors tried to lock down the BIOS pretty hard. Dell might still, I remember having to call and get assistance when a password was forgotten and they had to generate a backdoor key of some sort. Maybe that is less of a thing now that Bitlocker is widely used on corporate laptops and it is sensitive to tampering.
yeah, I did that in my high school years.(80386~80486 years). The jumper reset is neat cause you can then set the school computer to boot from floppy first instead of booting from whatever source it was set to.
So, how tf you have access to MB? Well, if you are much better at computers than most teachers at school, naturally they let you “help” doing the maintenance(aka, figure out what’s wrong, replace parts etc). I did those free labour so I can play some games during school hours, so that’s a fair trade.
