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
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" 😂
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
👍
Whiskey-ware
I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.
coming for sure
Half-chubware
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.
Chubware.
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.
holy shit
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? :)
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.
I''d like to know that where spyware is located?
Windows
it's in the walls
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.
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...
Can someone ELI5 what firmware actually is though? I kind of knew it was half way between, but i don’t know what that looks like.
Hardware is the physical part of computer.
Software is the code that runs on the computer to do the thing you want to do.
Firmware is the code that is installed on the hardware itself, usually in some sort of permanent or semi-permanent memory to make the hardware work.
Anyone remember shareware?
200+ Shareware games on a CD, played the shit outta those. And they came in magazines or were given out completely free.
I believe demos for games should still be the norm.
And they arrived (because I don’t want to use ‘came’ given this thread already) on cereal boxes.
I had never heard of that around here (Germany). Got my first PC '99, so I should have noticed; was looking everywhere for cheap Software deals. But there were some other companies which gave out free CD-ROMs as advertising with shareware and demo games. Some of those games were never finished, lol.
The Internet Archive has those Nestlé CDs btw :)
Happened in Canada for sure. The post made me go dig through boxes in the basement and try to remember where my old cdrom drive and cable that would connect to a new Mac would be found. Good times and worth it.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
