# Booting a computer?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 27, 2002, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173 "2002-07-27T23:36:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![I\_forgot\_my\_username](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ecd19e/32.png) [@I\_forgot\_my\_username](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_forgot_my_username)\
**Post date:** [July 27, 2002, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173/1 "2002-07-27T23:36:40Z")

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Why is it that when you want to use your Television, Stereo, etc, you turn it on, but when you want to use a computer, you boot it, and to restart it you reboot it. Do the older computers have bootprints on the front of them or something? 😉

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**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\
**Post date:** [July 27, 2002, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173/2 "2002-07-27T23:41:05Z")

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When a computer is turned on, it has to load a set of instructions–“software”–to tell it what to do; among other things, to tell it how to load its own operating system. This is called “booting” in reference to the old saw about pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.

Your toaster oven, light bulbs, etc. don’t have software, so they don’t need to be “booted”, just “switched on”.

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**Author:** ![Urban\_Ranger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Urban\_Ranger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urban_Ranger)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2002, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173/3 "2002-07-29T06:42:40Z")

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A lot of home appliances and other gadgets (such as mobile phones and PDA’s) also needs booting because they contain embedded microcontrollers. They do not switch on like a light but with a slight delay.

This delay is most obvious with game consoles and arcade game machines.

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**Author:** ![DVous\_Means](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@DVous\_Means](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DVous_Means)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2002, 7:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173/4 "2002-07-29T07:22:21Z")

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When I first started using a PC, I likened “booting” to a “kick in the guts” - an Australian expression for starting an engine. 🙂

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2002, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/booting-a-computer/121173/5 "2002-07-29T10:19:24Z")

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Just because I came in too late to answer the _actual_ question, I’ll give a bit of history.

🙂

In the old days, booting wasn’t automatic. The human starting the machine had to manually enter a program, the bootstrap loader, that was smart enough to hand control off to another program, which would then start up the OS or the application. This was accomplished through toggle switches on the front of the box, which meant you were entering the program in binary directly into RAM. Great effort was expended to make these bootstrap loaders as small as possible. Nowadays, bootstrap loaders are in ROM or EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory), so booting is just a matter of pushing a button and waiting.