• sloonark@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    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
    15·
    1 year ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

  • TechnologyClassroom@partizle.comEnglish
    13·
    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.

  • irkli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    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.

  • saltybrownsfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year 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.”

  • NewAgeOldPerson@reddthat.comEnglish
    4·
    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
      2·
      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.

      • player_entity_t@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        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
          3·
          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.

      • phx@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

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

  • 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
    3·
    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.

  • 21trillionsats@infosec.pubEnglish
    3·
    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?

  • 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.

    • 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.