• sloonark@lemm.ee
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    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. 🙄

  • kog@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

  • jantin@lemmy.world
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    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

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

  • Max_Power@feddit.de
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    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.

    • Ends@feddit.de
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      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.ee
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        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.ca
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        1 year ago

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

        • Ends@feddit.de
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          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.ca
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            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.

            • Ends@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              Got no “vintage” hardware sadly. In a VM it’s not the same. I still have a Floppy drive, but those disks were all corrupted eons ago. I wonder how long my heaps of gamer magazine and bundle-box (bought at Aldi for practically nothing _) CDs are still gonna last…

              They were the best of times, that’s for sure!

    • Odo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Oh man, Doom. Getting 1/3 of the whole game was incredible. Also Deus Ex years later. Some people hated the Ellis Island level, but I spent so much time exploring everywhere.

      • Ends@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I fucked around so long that I failed the mission. It gave a prompt that I had 17 minutes left to do the last thing, and ran out by 20 seconds or sth.

        Gotta give that game a whirl again soon, with proper textures & mods & fool around with ReShade for hours until my back hurts and I gotta lay down after an hour of actual gameplay, muhaha.

  • irkli@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • Klaboesterbeer@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    Damn… I always thought it meant the “firm” putting their “ware” on the chips. 😂

  • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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    1 year ago

    Then there’s wetware (people).

    I miss some of the older ones from my college days (1990s)… million logical instructions per second (megalips), and measuring mouse speed in mickeys/pixel.

  • TechnologyClassroom@partizle.com
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    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.

  • 21trillionsats@infosec.pub
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    1 year 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?

  • NewAgeOldPerson@reddthat.com
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    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.ca
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      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.ca
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        1 year ago

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

      • player_entity_t@lemmy.world
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        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.ca
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          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.