Re: What does boot mean??

A little background:  At one time, long, long ago, before floppies and
punched tape, people started computers by setting toggle switches
to form a command that the computer read when a button was pushed.
This command started a series of increasingly complex loading events
that culminated in the loading of the entire operating system from some
peripheral.  With a completely dumb computer and just one command,
the entire OS was loaded, resulting in a smart computer.  This was
analogous to someone lifting himself up by his bootstraps.  Thus the
terms "bootstrap" as a verb and "bootstrap loader" came into use, and
the terse term "boot" came to mean "start the bootstrap loading process
to load the operating system".

Nowadays, with CMOS boot loaders and entire OSes on an internal
hard drive, all that is invisible to a user.  But the "boot" process is still a
long series of increasingly complex load events to get from a single built-in
instruction in the CPU to the complete loading of an OS (or installation
executive program) into RAM.  And when one "boots from a CD", one
includes reading an executive program from a CD which then supervises
some sort of loading process - perhaps from a hard drive, perhaps from
the CD itself.

*TimDaniels*


"Dave Patrick" wrote: 
In other words "start/restart the computer" with the XP CD-Rom in the drive.

--
Regards,

Dave Patrick ....
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]


"Robb Reis" wrote:

Hello yet again.

I want to know what boot means, because I do not understand the lingo of computers that well yet. This is related to my other post "Problems trying to reinstall windows XP - HELP!!" I want to get rid of the newer version of XP of my computer, and install the old one I have and get the updates which I already know where to get them. 

Please someone tell me what boot means.
Robb

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