- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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I’m a high school teacher and I recently was discussing this. Protip: don’t talk to 14 year olds about how if something is in between hard and soft, it’s firm. 🙄
holy shit
What the hell!
How did I understand that just now?
possibly because a “firm” is also a word for a business / company, so “firmware” as the chipset software coming from the firm that manufactures said chipset makes perfect sense. at least that’s why I never sought an alternate explanation - and I am not fully convinced OP is right, actually.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware
History and etymology
Ascher Opler coined the term firmware in a 1967 Datamation article,[2][failed verification] as an intermediary term between “hardware” and “software”. In this article, Opler was referring to a new kind of computer program that had a different practical and psychological purpose from traditional programs from the user’s perspective.
As computers began to increase in complexity, it became clear that various programs needed to first be initiated and run to provide a consistent environment necessary for running more complex programs at the user’s discretion. This required programming the computer to run those programs automatically. Furthermore, as companies, universities, and marketers wanted to sell computers to laypeople with little technical knowledge, greater automation became necessary to allow a lay-user to easily run programs for practical purposes. This gave rise to a kind of software that a user would not consciously run, and it led to software that a lay user wouldn’t even know about.[3]
Originally, it meant the contents of a writable control store (a small specialized high-speed memory), containing microcode that defined and implemented the computer’s instruction set, and that could be reloaded to specialize or modify the instructions that the central processing unit (CPU) could execute. As originally used, firmware contrasted with hardware (the CPU itself) and software (normal instructions executing on a CPU). It was not composed of CPU machine instructions, but of lower-level microcode involved in the implementation of machine instructions. It existed on the boundary between hardware and software; thus the name firmware. Over time, popular usage extended the word firmware to denote any computer program that is tightly linked to hardware, including BIOS on PCs, boot firmware on smartphones, computer peripherals, or the control systems on simple consumer electronic devices such as microwave ovens, remote controls.
Fair enough :)
But firmware doesn’t have to be from the firm that manufacturers said chipset. Third party firmware is a common thing.
see that’s something that makes perfect sense but that I wasn’t actually aware of… Sorry for the late reaction, lemmy.world had enough server problems that I didn’t see my notifications in > 2 weeks…
I thought this was common knowledge. I distinctly remember this being taught in a basic high school computing class back in the 90’s.
So in the 90s I had different computer based classes in high school.
There was a “computers” class, which is probably the closest to what you’re talking about, in which we mostly learned how to use Microsoft Works.
I also was fortunate enough to have some programming classes. We started out with QBasic and then the more advanced level was visual basic.
None of these discussed firmware. If it came up at all it was probably a casual side conversation because someone bricked something trying to update it.
We started out with QBasic and then the more advanced level was visual basic.
fun times with gorilla.bas? :)
I did have a classmate try to replicate Simon in QBasic but he kept needing the input reversed.
I told him the “feature not a bug” line and suggested he call it NOMIS
Had to look that up - seen it before but never played. Sorry for the late reaction, lemmy.world had enough server problems that I didn’t see my notifications in > 2 weeks…
No worries. Lemmy feels way more casual than Reddit anyway and I got notifications for months old comments there from time to time
Now if only I could find a way to open - from my notification about your response - your comment in the context of the community - but on my own instance. I have tried clicking on “Show context” -> links to the home server of the community, where I can not post / respond. Clicking anywhere else:
- Username: takes me to your profile
- Community: takes me to my instance’s view of the community in which we are communicating
- Post name: takes me to my instance’s view of the thread in which we are communicating, but of course without context to the comment
- link symbol: does nothing
- Show context: see above, takes me to the correct place, on the wrong instance
- Timestamp: does nothing
:(
Anyways, I like lemmy a lot, but I think with the recent nasty defederation announcement at lemmy.world from hexbear I’ll have to find another instance as home…
FWIW I home at midwest.social. It’s not strictly for the Midwest US but you’ll see a lot of stuff for that region there. It’s also left leaning and I think the only instances they’ve defederated so far have been for extremism.
I’m also using jerboa on my phone and from my inbox there’s a speech bubble button which lets me make this response from my inbox.
I don’t know if either of these things will help you but I figured I’d offer them just in case they did.
