Boot to the bread!

[weirdami]

...board, that is. :-P

OK, so I'm looking at the homepage and someone's having a problem with their A3000T not booting, but it's been solved. I was inspired to think about why "boot" is being used to describe a computer turning on. It's always been that way: boot this, boot that, wait 30 seconds before rebooting, etc.

Where'd that term come from? Is it from the old ENIAC days where when the machine didn't come on after a 3 week reprogram, they'd throw a boot at it to get it working? Much like how "bug" comes from there being creepy crawly bugs in one of those warehouse sized compu-matro-brainiatrix-alators causing the program not to work?

[xeron]

I believe it stems from the phrase to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps", which is an old phrase meaning "to succeed without external help", for example "My dad built his business up all by himself! He had to pull himself up by his bootstraps!"

In some really old computers, there was no BIOS equivalent. You literally had to put bits into memory using switches before starting the main processor.

Computers with boot code in some form of ROM could do their initial power-up without intervention from the user. The code that is called when you immediately turn it on was known as "bootstrap code", after the phrase. The machine is brought up by the bootstrap!

[Plus4]

I was under the impression that very very old winchester hard drives had to be literally kick started using a pedal to get them spinning.

We learnt this in computer studies in the 80's...

[Matt_H]

I've also heard the bootstraps story. It's in one of the old Commodore manuals.

[irishmike]

I believe it to be the bootstrap story as well.  Although it is true that a bug got into the works on an old mainframe and now a "bug" in the software is derived from that fateful day.

Alot of our "technical jargon" comes from roots of this nature.  

One of my keen observations (please note that this is another way of saying "in my opinion") is that Amigans hold the true spirit of the early computer pioneers.  We tend to experiment and tweak our machines to get them to bend to our will -- or whatever we would like the machine to do.  We of course are hybrid users and programmers mainly because to use the platform requires this as software is now mainly written user to user as opposed to being company to user or Big Freakin' Monopoly to user like the rest of the world.

I think as a community, we are more tied to our hardware when we write code.   It seems that coding today equates to web applications or online applications and you basically have Applications to run your custom application instead of actually getting in there and "talking" to the hardware with machine code and so forth.  Programming is mainly advanced word processing these days.

(Again, see my opinion) :-)

[pedro7]

Plus4 wrote:
I was under the impression that very very old winchester hard drives had to be literally kick started using a pedal to get them spinning.

We learnt this in computer studies in the 80's...

I hope this is the origin of the phrase  :-) . Having to spin up the hard disks yourself would be kinda cool.

[weirdami]

Having to spin up the hard disks yourself would be kinda cool.

I guess it's good that early computers didn't have hampster wheels to start them or else we'd be stuck with "I hate having to rehampster everytime I install something." :-D