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Open Firmware is a hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system), developed by Sun Microsystems, and used in modern Apple Macintosh computers, Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. On those computers, Open Firmware fullfills the same tasks as BIOS does on PC computers.
It is accessed by a user by a FORTH-based language shell interface. FORTH is a powerful high level language. For example it is possible to program Open Firmware (http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/firmware/src/ofhanoi.txt) to solve the Hanoi Towers problem.
On Macintosh the Open Firmware shell interface can be accessed by pressing the keys Apple-Option-O-F at startup. This functionality is generally only used by developers, as for common users, the Mac OS X Operating System provides a high level graphical user interface to set up Open Firmware. For instance, it is possible to specify the boot disk or partition, without using the shell.
It is described by IEEE standard IEEE-1275.
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