Origin of the term “driver” in computer science | Hacker News Reader

Origin of the term “driver” in computer science

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45 pointsgioele6 comments

It would be my guess that the origin is electrical. A "driver" is a common term for any subsidiary circuit supplying the needs of the components you really care about. (e.g. mosfet driver).

Unlike a particularly driven SO poster, I'm too lazy to try to search for pre-war EE journals or radio magazines where one might find the term.

P.S. There seems to be very few scanned copies of early radio/electronics magazines online. Very sad. I loved leafing through them when I could find them in dead-tree format. Do libraries even archive this tsuff anymore?

Old magazines are quite fascinating. I spent some time in the university library reading old videotex magazines, that strange precursor to the web. One told about a swear word appearing, the first ever, another of the first ecommerce, unauthorized.

That would be my guess too. I came to software engineering from electronics engineering and the meaning of software driver was immediatly obvious to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_circuit

The term "driver" as engineering parlance for "something that impels" is also substantially older than electronics. It can be used to refer to tools and to mechanical parts that serve roughly the same purpose as the aforementioned circuits.

That's my guess too. With digital IO, you can say "drive an output pin high". In the old days that was done with transistors (TTL, later CMOS). It's seems logical if you had hardware connected to a digital IO, you could refer to the software as driving the hardware.

Pretty sure the PDP-8 had the ability to use different peripherals off it's bus and therefore needed code for each one.

PDP-8 was mid-1960s so check it's manual and manual for its peripherals.

Maybe the word "driver" was borrowed from magnetic tape drivers?

There are also "solenoid driver boards" in the PDP8 so the word has a logic circuit meaning too.

Gate drivers and SCR drivers, etc. all physical circuits before software. So software borrowed the concept.

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