Released in the early 90s by the Japanese company Trend Micro
Devices, Inc (later just Trend Micro), Chip Away Viruses is a DOS
based virus scanner that is intended to run from a hardware product
built in to a PC motherboard before the system boots. It includes a
custom embeddable DOS (called X-DOS), but it can be run from regular
DOS. Trend Micro also produced the products PC Rx (A regular software
virus scanner), and PC-cillin (a hardware/software combo that keeps
critical boot information in a special device). Users sometimes
misinterpreted the name "ChipAway Virus" as being a virus itself.