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!

Report from the Nostalgia Dept.

Someone out there actually set up a site that uses a Commodore 64 as a web server.

While I'm not sure that this provides any significant benefit to the world, it does demonstrate that, technologically, it would have been possible for the internet to establish a presence much earlier than it actually did.

There were plenty of modems, and on-line bulletin boards in the 80s. SGML, the forerunner of HTML, was published in 1980. And there was even a prototype web browser developed by Apple, called Hypercard. Unfortunately, Apple was unable to leverage the potential of the internet back in those days -- their EWorld online service was a disaster.

So why is it that the internet didn't really become a a global phenomenon until the mid-90's?