Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Where did the term booting come from, as in booting a computer? According to my UNIX teacher, booting is a shortening of bootstrapping.

The challenge of loading up an OS onto a computer is that the computer needs instructions that tell it *how* to load the OS. It's a sort of chicken and egg problem. These instructions are hard-wired into the ROM and executed when power is turned on; they locate the computer's boot program on an input device -- HD, floppy, CD-ROM -- and execute it. So in a sense, the computer is pulling itself up by its bootstraps.

I'm no hardware engineer, but I don't understand why someone can't design computers that starts up immediately, like most appliances do. Those 2 minutes of bootstrapping are such an inconvenience!