• sloonark@lemm.eeEnglish
    20·
    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. 🙄

  • 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·
            11 months 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·
              11 months 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·
                11 months 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·
                  11 months 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.

  • irkli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    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
    1·
    1 year ago

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

  • kog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

  • NewAgeOldPerson@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    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.

    • 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·
          11 months 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…

  • jantin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    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

    • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      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.

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

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

        • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
          0·
          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.

  • MarmaladeMermaid@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • fuzzybee@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.