New subject: Article on old software programs (for IBM, Apple, Borland, etc)

20 Aug 1999

RIGHT!  You have removable hard drives, as I do, and probably have
non-removable PROMs (FLASH-types) as well.  Now, what to we call this stuff?

Back to my original comment about semantics, other parts of the electronics
industry and other industries, are calling the content of CD's and tapes
"software" as more and more similarity becomes apparent to the public.
Additionally, the legal system has begun to see them in the same way.  The
devices which define our computers are becoming defined more and more by
what we used to call software, though now perhaps we should call it
firmware, and yet the simple boundaries I once understood to support these
definitions now have become blurred by the movement of what used to be
firmware into volatile media and of what used to be "software" into
non-volatile media, e.g. the PCMCIA Flash-disks I mentioned.

I don't think we'll have to wait long for a situation to arise, in which one
links to a site on the web, is fed a download of configuration data which
defines how the system on which one's running is to be defined, then reads
the code which will be executed on the specifically configured "hardware"
environment.  Instead of the hardware defining how the software must be
configured, the software will define the way in which the hardware addresses
its requirements.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Franke &lt;Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Friday, August 20, 1999 6:08 AM
Subject: RE: Article on old software programs (for IBM, Apple, Borland, etc)

...
     If you said
that that computer had "hardware software" I would have
 to kill you ;-) 
 Firmware?  Definitely firmware. You can grab it and remove
it. It is
 plugged in. 
Well, I own a removable harddisk (plugged in) -
I can grap it and remove it -
so Win98 is firmware ?

As we might see, the terms are not that fixed as
we would loke it (also a reason why I hate all
this denglish tems - already fuzy terms from a
foreign language used without knowledge of their
orgin nor any concept for genuine meaning :( ).

Gruss
H.

--
Traue keinem Menschen der 5 Tage blutet und immer noch nicht tod ist. 