• sloonark@lemm.eeEnglish
    28·
    1 year ago

    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. 🙄

  • jantin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    Wait… It’s not “firm” as in “company that made the stuff”? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make

  • kog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

  • TechnologyClassroom@partizle.comEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • NewAgeOldPerson@reddthat.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • evranch@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • phx@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Nibbles can also be used with image types that are less than 8-bit

      • player_entity_t@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • evranch@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • irkli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    By the way, “joystick” was kinda rude back in the day, but nobody even notices now.

  • Max_Power@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.

  • Lachy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I thought this was common knowledge. I distinctly remember this being taught in a basic high school computing class back in the 90’s.

    • Doug [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • Doug [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          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

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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…

            • Doug [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              No worries. Lemmy feels way more casual than Reddit anyway and I got notifications for months old comments there from time to time

              • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                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…

                • Doug [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

    • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I think demos are coming back. I have a bunch on steam recently, and Nintendo has a ton of them on thier storefront.

      • J.M.@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        And they arrived (because I don’t want to use ‘came’ given this thread already) on cereal boxes.

        • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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 :)

          • J.M.@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            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.

    • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • CaptObvious@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        But firmware doesn’t have to be from the firm that manufacturers said chipset. Third party firmware is a common thing.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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…

    • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I disagree. Firmware originally referred to things in ROM or EEPROM. Basically software that is firmly in place and doesn’t change, providing an abstraction layer between the hardware and software.

      • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        This treats the software as if it were a physical chip which can’t be practically changed due to the physics of microchips. The imutability of the storage medium is just a choice of the manufacturer. Sometimes this is a good cost saving feature and sometimes this so they can include anti-features such as preventing repairing your device (e.g. OneWheel).

        • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          I’m just telling you where the word comes from. It’s like floppy disks, the 3.5mm ones weren’t floppy but that’s still what we called them because they once were. Firmware used to be something you couldn’t easily change. It sits between the hardware and the software. What exactly would you call it if you think the term is bad?

            • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
              01·
              1 year ago

              Honestly, I think you’re wrong here, they were colloquially called floppy disks because at the time the whole thing was floppy. If the first floppy disks came in hard casings, they would never have been called floppy disks

              • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Take apart a 3.25" floppy disk, you’ll find the magnetic platter (disc shaped thing) is floppy.

                Take apart a hard disk drive, you’ll find the magnetic platter(s) inside are metal.

                If a floppy disk wasn’t named after the thing inside the casing, why wasn’t it called a floppy square or floppy rectangle?

                • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
                  01·
                  1 year ago

                  It actually was originally a floppy diskette, but eventually shortened to disk because people are lazy

            • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
              01·
              1 year ago

              Nope it came from the housing, it was originally called a diskette. The disk itself isn’t really floppy tbh, more bendy. But the old diskettes were floppy af