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. 🙄
There’s a surprisingly more expansive demographic that pro tip applies to.
Tip
Hehe
You called out “tip”, but you left “expansive” just lying there helpless?
Don’t worry, it’ll rise to the occasion
Expansive tip?
Yepp, just the tip.
I’m 41f (going on 13 at times), and this is why my husband hates(loves) having me around the shop - all the mechanical everything is full of euphemisms and innuendo. “mating surfaces” 😂
Yeah, that tip is applicable for a lot of people who understand what sex is, this isn’t something that really goes away with age in a lot of cases.
Are emojis acceptable here? Because I’d like to insert the hand raise one here
I think yes, let’s make a new culture of restrained emoji use 🙌
Oh were they referring to praise hands? I thought they meant 🙋
I was high fiving their raised hand
👍
The Breakfast Club fist pump. There should be a dedicated emoji for that.
I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.
coming for sure
Whiskey-ware
This guy doesn’t fuck.
Not for lack of trying! He got that ropeware bug
Half-chubware
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.
Well, it’s usually closer to the hardware though. Your average x86/64 software dev doesn’t have to struggle with pins, addresses, buses and timings that much, if at all.
Everyones a hardware engineer they just don’t want to admit it.
I’'d like to know that where spyware is located?
Windows
<whispers> it’s in the walls
'Til the sweat drop down my balls
Closed source source, motherfucker!
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Like in the kitchen?
Jk
TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
Mind? Blown.
Pants? Shat.
Hotel? Trivago
Doctor? Zhivago.
Firmware is a metaphor, not an analogy.
Hardware is… Hard. Changing it is a big deal. It has mass!
Software is… Soft. It goes away when you turn the power off, and it’s modified at runtime. It weighs nothing, changes “instantly”.
Firmware is neither and both. It’s stored in hardware (EPROM, EEPROM, Flash, …) that you can take out and insert.
The metaphor is around temporality and physicality.
Sorry, pedant nerd.
At the time EEPROMs were becoming common, core memory was still common enough. Core was great! Power fail circuitry caused registers to save and the whole machine state was remembered.
By the way, “joystick” was kinda rude back in the day, but nobody even notices now.
What was more acceptable? “Control stick”?
No, “joystick” was the original term. Everyone in the past were a bunch of perverts.
It could have been worse. It could have been named enjoystick…
It was named by pilots. It’s in the, um, cockpit.
glad that changed
Disco stick, as in
“Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”
what ? why ?
Wikipedia seems to suggest it was an original term, first recorded use in 1909, and mentions nothing about alternative terms or controversy. I call BS
He means rude as in people made a sexual innuendo out of it.
I remember in late 90s my brother bought a joystick. The brand was ThrustMaster. Literally, that was the name. ThrustMaster Joystick.
We still laugh about it sometimes.
Then there’s wetware (people).
I miss some of the older ones from my college days (1990s)… million logical instructions per second (megalips), and measuring mouse speed in mickeys/pixel.
Of course there’s people, the ID-10-T module needs to be installed somewhere!
I thought they required a PEN-15 adapter back then?
With the advent of lab grown animal neurons interfacing with parts, we need to expand the definition of “wetware”.
It’s meat. Doesn’t even need to be people meat. Just meat that can be trained to react to stimuli, which opens up some options depending on complexity.
So technically, the Pigeon Bomb means wetware predates both software and firmware.
Wait… It’s not “firm” as in “company that made the stuff”? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make
I thought exactly the same thing…
Okay, but now explain Hard and Soft
This was my assumption too, but I like this description better.
I’m here like “whynotboth.gif”
I like it…
Wow. I’ve never connected that dot either. Cool!
I thought this was common knowledge. I distinctly remember this being taught in a basic high school computing class back in the 90’s.
Extra firmware cannot be modified.
Firm firmware might be able to be modified, but documentation is largely unknown.
Silken firmware is easily modified by the user.
These names are taken from tofu packaging.
My favorite is smoked firmware.
Mmm … Tender ware
Super firm trust on first use.
oh my god you blew my mind and I also work in IT
Damn… I always thought it meant the “firm” putting their “ware” on the chips. 😂
I actually never tried to find any meaning to it. I thought it was just software for the BIOS (which it is), and that’s it.
But this half wat between soft and hard? Whoa.
It’s not software for the BIOS, it is the BIOS.
You’re or course right!
Same
Firmware is the Hardware of Software
I’ve always thought of it more as the software of hardware.
That sounds like drivers
It’s all one big layers system.
For sake of example let’s take a GPU.
You have the hardware itself, which is rather static and non-changeable after it was manufactured.
Then the firmware is the software that runs inside the card itself in some dedicated chip with interface to control that hardware. It is programmable and replaceable.
Then the driver is the software that runs on the OS, and acts as an interface for other softwares that run on the same OS to talk to if they want to use the GPU. The driver would use the interface that the firmware exposes. Since each OS has a different way of writing hardware interfaces drivers are written for a specific OS.
Then you have software like DirectX or OpenGL that provide yet another standardized interface, only this time between different manufacturers like NVidia, AMD, Intel, etc to talk to supported GPU drivers.
Then you would have the software itself, like a game engine, video player, whatever.
But drivers sound like bvrrrrrmmm.
