In my post Foundation stone #2 we saw that BIOS is the one that takes in charge when you switch on your PC. After collecting the inventory of available and properly working hardware, the BIOS sets up what is called as the Interrupts area. An interrupt is a signal to the processor that there is something that needs its attention. As such each and every piece of hardware that is put together in your PC is useless unless it is orchestrated well. Take for example the keyboard, if the attention is not given at the right time when you press a key and reciprocated accordingly wherever you are then you can call the thing that is sitting in front of you as dumb

So when the BIOS is done with the inventory of hardware, it initializes a memory space of 1024 bytes starting at 0000:0000h (this is a representation of memory location in the form of segment:offset in hexadecimal). An interrupt is a small routine or code that has the necessary details of the interrupt and occupies 4 bytes. So starting at memory location 0000:0000h interrupts are stored. So a total of 256 interrupts can be stored in a the allotted 1024 bytes but all is not being initialized by the BIOS. There are different types of interrupts, hardware interrupts, software interrupts, user interrupts and so on. The BIOS fills up the hardware interrupts and the software interrupts are mostly added by the OS.

The Interrupt Vector Table (IVT) is a mapping of the interrupt number and the memory location in the form of segment:offset. This memory location contains the  interrupt code for that particular interrupt. It is the responsibility of the OS to keep track of the IVT and monitor for interrupt and notify the processor. So what happens when you press a key or release a key, the keyboard send signals that contain information on what key was pressed or released. This gets stored in the memory location assigned for the keyboard interrupt (traditionally interrupt 09h is for keyboard). The OS which is constantly looking for these interrupts immediately captures the information and sends it for processing accordingly. The interrupt number and other details could differ from one BIOS manufacturer to other. You can get a lot of information about BIOS and interrupts from the BIOS central site.