What Was the Original Codename for UEFI?

Modern computers rely on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) to initialize hardware components and load the operating system during the boot process. While UEFI is an open industry standard today, it originated in the mid-1990s as a proprietary research initiative developed by Intel to overcome the strict technical limits of the legacy PC BIOS. This article explains the original codename of the UEFI project, why Intel created it, and how it evolved into the modern standard used today.

The original codename for the technology that eventually became UEFI was the Intel Boot Initiative (often abbreviated as IBI).

Intel started the Intel Boot Initiative in the mid-1990s during the early development phases of the Intel-HP Itanium (IA-64) enterprise server platform. At the time, personal computers still relied on the traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) architecture designed by IBM in 1981. The legacy BIOS operated under severe technological constraints: it was locked to 16-bit processor mode, could only address up to 1 MB of system memory, relied heavily on legacy Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning (which capped partition sizes at 2.2 TB), and lacked the capability to handle high-performance 64-bit enterprise architectures.

Because the legacy BIOS could not scale to meet the demands of the new 64-bit Itanium architecture, Intel engineers under the Intel Boot Initiative set out to design an entirely new, modular firmware interface. The goal of IBI was to separate firmware initialization routines from the operating system, allowing modular device drivers, faster boot execution, and modern memory addressing.

In the late 1990s, Intel renamed the Intel Boot Initiative to EFI, which stood for Extensible Firmware Interface. Intel released the first public EFI specification (version 1.02) in 2000, followed by EFI 1.10 in 2002.

To encourage industry-wide adoption and avoid standard fragmentation among competing hardware manufacturers, Intel contributed the EFI specification to an independent, non-profit trade organization in 2005: the Unified EFI Forum. With participating technology companies such as AMD, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, the specification was formally renamed to UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), fully replacing both the legacy BIOS and Intel's original internal boot specifications across mainstream consumer and enterprise hardware.