• 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.

  • Klaboesterbeer@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

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

  • 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.

      • 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!

      • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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?

  • MarmaladeMermaid@lemm.ee
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    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.ee
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      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.

        • Kept7963@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Say you have your display, this is made up of millions of lights that on their own just light up in whatever single colour you want, but together they light up to create an image.

          Your software takes care of breaking down that image of a cat you want to look at into its corresponding pixels - with a value for colour and brightness.

          For example it’ll say this area in the cat’s eye is black, so it’ll request the no light to come out of it. Another area might be a pale red so it’ll request red with some middle level of brightness.

          Now your firmware takes that requested black for a specific Pixel and it’ll physically cut power to switch off all the lights in the required area. For the pale red it’ll power that the red ligh ON with hald power, whilst green and blue are OFF.

          (things get more complex once you consider back-lightning)

        • whaleross@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Firmware is software that makes the hardware do what it is supposed to do that runs on the hardware itself.

          The term is used somewhat ambiguously though.

          • Sometimes it is just the pure functionality, “if button is pressed, flip the lights on/off”.
          • Sometimes it glues communication with the functionality, “if signal is received over some interface, flip the lights on/off”.
          • Sometimes it has an operating system, “when power is on, initiate communications with hardware and interfaces and load software if it is present to interact with any of these”.
          • Sometimes it is a package with both operating system and software, “when power is on, initiate communications with hardware and interfaces and load software that I know is present”.
          • Sometimes the OS and/or software in the firmware package has a helpful front facing user interface.
    • BasicTraveler@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s software that lives in the hardware. It provides low-level control and functionality specific to that device. It runs on the hardware itself, not the CPU of the computer.

      For example, a hard drive. We don’t want the OS to have to know how to interact with every type of hard drive. Seagate does things differently than Western Digital, an SSD works very different than a hard drive, etc… The OS sends the same commands to all types of hard drives, but each hard drive needs to know how to actually comply with the commands. If the OS is asking for a dozen different files all over the drive, it would be dumb to try and read them all at the same time. The OS doesn’t really know where they are on the spinning disk, but the drive does. Firmware written specifically for the device can do a much better job planing how to fetch the data so the read head doesn’t need to go back and forth a bunch of times, but instead make one good pass fetching all the data as it comes to it.

      Hope that helps.

    • Andojus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      FIRMware is SOFTware (code) that contains the instructions to run HARDware. In most cases you would experience it, hardware is running an OS (Operating System) which manages all of the firmware ‘packages’. Many electronics, particularly more sophisticated, have firmware that is directly loaded onto the device which has a proprietary OS with limited to no graphical interface.

      I am a layperson so if an expert can weigh in on my take I’d appreciate it!

      • just_browsing@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Firmware doesn’t run on an OS, you’re probably thinking of drivers which are different. Drivers are software that tell the OS how to interact with specific hardware.

        Firmware is software that’s baked into specific hardware components and it exists outside of the OS. A visible example most people are familiar with would be the BIOS which is firmware for the motherboard. Hard drives, graphics cards, RAM, etc all also have their own firmware.

        Other devices such as microwaves, washing machines, cars, or anything using microprocessors (so pretty much everything these days) also have components with their own firmware. It is true that device firmware can drive a UI on some devices such a as a microwave, but most people today wouldn’t consider that to be an OS (semantics, I know).

        • suodrazah@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, nah…read the other reply. The comment you are replying to is a swing and miss.