Reminds me, in about 1988 I got a promotion because I was the only one at the company who knew how to get the new PC to boot up.
So, who first ivented boot up? It doesn't even have feet much less footwear.
The term "boot" is short for "bootstrap," which is derived from the term "to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps," which, in turn, means to build an enterprise from nothing without any outside help. It's application to computers is credited to Werner Buchholz.
In the case computers, "bootstrapping" is the process where a computer system progressively adds capabilities by using a small program in read-only memory (ROM) to load a larger more capable program into random-access memory (RAM), which, in turn, loads an even more capable program into RAM and so forth. This approach was taken because early computers were resource constrained. Read-only memory (ROM) was at a premium; therefore, there was only enough space in ROM for code to initialize the machine and read a block of data off of a peripheral device (tape or disk drive) into a fixed memory location.
The first computer on which I worked could not boot itself at power on. One had to enter the address of the boot routine into the program counter (a register that holds the address of the next instruction to be executed) and toggle the run switch. The machine was prehistoric compared to a modern deskop or even a 1981 IBM PC.
Topic: Who coined the term flameout? (Read 4851 times)
