Firmware is broken terminology | Hacker News Reader

Firmware is broken terminology

hacktivis.me

30 pointstodsacerdoti11 comments

Like a few other tech terms, it's got a jocular etymology. People saw something developing that wasn't "hard" and it wasn't "soft" so it was "firm".

Likewise, we began to "load" stuff, not "up" or "down", but to the "side".

A googol (the number) is something uttered by a mathematician's toddler.

I'm sure that programmers were chuckling when we went from "bits" to "bytes" but we hardly even think about that anymore.

So why not, let's have squishyware, and viscousware, and stickyware, and put them next to our vaporware?

> Likewise, we began to "load" stuff, not "up" or "down", but to the "side".

In the early or mid 2000s, I remember using a file hosting service which advertised sideloading as a feature — by that, they meant you could paste in a URL of a file on the Web, and the service would download the file directly into your storage space, skipping the need to download to disk first then upload from there.

I think the more common term for that is transloading.

Seems to be primarily a warehouse/shipping term, but OK.

"File transfer" -- too generic?

Things are even more fun on the hardware-ish side. Some FPGA boards load a sort of bootloader circuit from on-board flash which enables a host to reflash the board over things like PCIe on power up. What do you call the design that does this? It's not really hardware (though the RTL describes hardware!) and it's not really software (though it is clearly a bootloader!). An even worse one is things like state machines because there's no real technical difference between a state machine which blinks an LED and a massive out-of-order processor; they're both just state machines of different scales.

One term that's sort of caught on for FPGA designs is "gateware" but people still argue about it.

The thing that blew my mind was how you can replace discrete transistor logic with memory. While it is sort of obvious in retrospect. I think it an important insight into the nature of computation.

Making combinational logic gates from transistors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTu3LwpF6XI

Using an EEPROM to replace combinational logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA12Z7gQ4P0

Firmware is software that is specific to its hardware. It is directly configuring/operating the peripherals through their registers.

An embedded device is the alternative to a general purpose computer such as a smartphone or laptop. The users of general purpose computers can decide which applications get run, unlike embedded devices. Of course, other software can limit the user's ability to make those decisions, but that is not an inherent limit of the system, that is an artificial limitation imposed by another person.

I work on embedded software for EV chargers. When I speak to an outsider, all I do is firmware. When I speak to my fellow software developers, we differentiate between RaspPi code as software and PIC16 code as firmware. When we speak to our hardware people, they insist that it’s all software.

The perception of “it doesn’t change easily/often” is pervasive but subjective.

"Embedded software" and "embedded system" also have similar issues with being nebulously defined in various situations. Some things will never perfect and at least firmware is kind of cute.

(Bryan Catrill enters the chat)

Paraphrasing: There’s a war coming and you have to pick a side. Humanity vs Firmware.

https://youtu.be/XbBzSSvT_P0

DSP -> firmware MCU -> software

Reply on news.ycombinator.com