Origin of The Term
Ascher Opler coined the term "firmware" in a 1967 Datamation article. 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".
Still later, popular usage extended the word "firmware" to denote anything ROM-resident, including processor machine-instructions for BIOS, bootstrap loaders, or specialized applications.
Until the mid-1990s, updating firmware typically involved replacing a storage medium containing firmware, usually a socketed ROM. Flash memory allows firmware to be updated without physically removing an integrated circuit from the system. An error during the upgrade process may make the device non-functional, or "bricked".
Read more about this topic: Firmware
Famous quotes containing the words origin of the, origin of, origin and/or term:
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)
“Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)