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. 🙄
I had a physics teacher who measured something against his hand in front of class and started to say, “You should try to…” then stopped before telling us he almost said “you should try to use your body to measure whenever possible” but stopped because he remembered he was talking to a room full of high schoolers.
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” 😂
This reminds me of when, during the building and development of the Apollo program- electrical engineers were tasked with effectively creating the “software” of the guidance system, and when one of the lead developers told his wife “I’m working on the software for the rocket” She replied “We’re not going to tell people that you’re working in underpants.”
Started computer science in grade school with only an hour of actual computer time a week. A LOT of theory and history. Charles Babbage, Ada, ENIAC, etc.
This stuff was drilled into our heads. Same with bit, byte and, halfway between bit and byte, a nibble. It’s a thing. 4 bits is a nibble.
Funny enough, I couldn’t code to save my life now.
Nibbles are still a thing in embedded programming and in ultra low bandwidth comms like LoRa. For example you can pack 2 BCD digits into a byte, one for the high nibble and one for the low nibble. This results in the hex representation of the byte actually being directly readable as the two digits, which is convenient.
Datasheet for sensors will sometimes reference nibbles as well, often for status bits on protocols like Onewire where every bit counts. i.e low nibble contains a state value 0-15 and high nibble contains individual alarm flags.
QBasic came with NIBBLES.BAS, a snake game using text-mode characters as “pixels”. Specifically it faked a 80x50 “pixel” grid using the standard 80x25 text screen where each 8-bit (=1 byte) text character made up two monochrome pixels using ▄ or ▀ or █ or an empty space.
I assume the name derived from the fact that, in a way, one pixel was “using half a byte”, i. e. a nibble.
Such good memories of learning to code as a kid in QBasic, I remember NIBBLES.BAS.
I was totally spoiled as my dad had the professional paid version which had an incredible IDE for the time and things like user defined types and structs that I later found out weren’t usually part of BASIC. It also had a ton of fancy graphics modes, double buffering, and even a sprite library. I loved playing around making crappy games.
My non-tech wife tried to tell me “obviously that’s why it’s called that” when I’ve been writing software (and even some minor firmware hacking) for 30 years.
The only common thing between software and firmware is the coding part. Everything else is different. Fault tolerance, memory management, MCU optimization, etc.
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.
I always think of it as software that’s saved on the hardware. But I guess technically all software is saved on hardware, but firmware is saved on hardware that’s different from the hardware you normally save it on.
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.
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…
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.
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