• sloonark@lemm.eeEnglish
    41·
    2 years 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. 🙄

  • TechnologyClassroom@partizle.comEnglish
    26·
    2 years 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.

  • 21trillionsats@infosec.pubEnglish
    261·
    2 years ago

    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.

    Is this the real life?

  • irkli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    241·
    2 years 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.

  • NewAgeOldPerson@reddthat.comEnglish
    23·
    2 years 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
      8·
      2 years 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.

      • player_entity_t@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 years 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
          3·
          2 years 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.

      • phx@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

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

  • kog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    2 years ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

  • jantin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    191·
    2 years 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

  • saltybrownsfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.”

    • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
      16·
      2 years 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
        11·
        2 years 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
          3·
          2 years 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
              31·
              2 years 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
                2·
                2 years 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
                  11·
                  2 years ago

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

            • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
              11·
              2 years 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

          • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            2 years ago

            Device functionality software, which is low-level? Probably won’t win any minds.

            Besides, if we (and others reading) know what concepts each other is referring to then it really doesn’t matter what word we use.

            • Shikadi@wirebase.orgEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              Firmware is easier to say, at a company I worked at we also called FPGAs gateware which was both interesting and convenient

    • Metallibus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      2 years ago

      It’s closer to the hardware. Generally harder to update. It’s less frequently updated. And it’s less fault tolerant.

      Idk, sure, it’s technically software. But it’s pretty clearly at least a distinct subsection that deserves it’s own moniker.

    • el_pablo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      2 years ago

      The only common thing between software and firmware is the coding part. Everything else is different. Fault tolerance, memory management, MCU optimization, etc.

  • Max_Power@feddit.deEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

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

  • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

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

      • FightMilk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Wikipedia seems to suggest it was an original term, first recorded use in 1909, and mentions nothing about alternative terms or controversy. I call BS

        • Rodeo@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          He means rude as in people made a sexual innuendo out of it.

          I remember in late 90s my brother bought a joystick. The brand was ThrustMaster. Literally, that was the name. ThrustMaster Joystick.

          We still laugh about it sometimes.

    • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years 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.