bootstrap
to start a process
TRANSLATION
bootstrap = die Stiefelschlaufe, das Startprogramm, autark sein (bootstrapped) Der Begriff bootstrapping (englisch für Stiefelschlaufe, sinngemäß: sich an den eigenen Stiefeln herausziehen, englisches Gegenstück für "an den eigenen Haaren aus dem Sumpf ziehen") bezeichnet einen Vorgang bei dem ein einfaches System ein komplexeres System startet. Der Begriff findet sich in verschiedenen technischen Bereichen (Elektrotechnik, Informatik, Statistik, Finanzwirtschaft, Wissenschaft, Medizin) (LEO, DH, Wikipedia) --- GOOGLE INDEX bootstrap: approximately 8,900,000 hits
STATISTICS
IN THE PRESS
Historically, women-owned companies have tended to start small and stay small, and that's still the case for many, says Lynn Neeley, professor of management at the College of Business at Northern Illinois University. Today's difference: Women don't expect their small companies to stay that way. But Neeley says it's still tough for most women to BOOTSTRAP their growth because they simply don't have the cash flow to justify a bank loan.
(Entrepreneur Magazine)
---
Linux could draw on an existing base of freely available source code to BOOTSTRAP the project, but the OpenMoko project needed to build a foundation before getting started.
(The O'Reilly Network)
(Entrepreneur Magazine)
---
Linux could draw on an existing base of freely available source code to BOOTSTRAP the project, but the OpenMoko project needed to build a foundation before getting started.
(The O'Reilly Network)
Did you
know?
bootstrap
noun
- a loop of leather, cloth, or synthetic material that is sewn at the side or the top rear of a boot to help in pulling the boot on
- an instance of starting of a computer; a boot
verb
- to promote and develop by use of one's own initiative and work without reliance on outside help
- to boot (a computer)
bootstrapped
adjective
- undertaken or accomplished with minimal outside help
- being or relating to a process that is self-initiating or self-sustaining
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition)
---
WORD ORIGIN
To understand how bootstrap came to be used in the computer world, we must refer to the expression "to lift oneself by one's own bootstraps”, which is the idea of achieving something on your own. Bootstraps are leather loops inside the top of heavy boots that you can pull on in order to get the boot onto your foot. Thus we have the image of getting oneself off the ground by pulling on the bootstraps.
This figurative use of bootstrap may have its roots in the adventures of Baron von Münchhausen and his outrageous tale of pulling himself and his horse out of the swamp by his own hair (instead of his bootstraps). However, the phrase can be found in the U.S. as far back as the mid 1800s and may derive from the picture of the frontiersman or cowboy pulling on his boots in preparation for another day of hard work in the harsh conditions of the Wild West. After all, these people endured one hardship after another, which demanded that they pull themselves up by their bootstraps every day.
In the early days of computing in the 1950s, the phrase was borrowed to describe the difficult process of starting a computer. Since many computer pioneers were avid science-fiction readers, the immediate stimulus may have been a well-known 1941 Robert Heinlein time-travel short story called By His Bootstraps.
The process of bootstrapping a computer involved reading in a short program, either by pressing keys on the console or reading them from paper tape. This series of commands then read in a slightly more complicated program, such as from punched cards. This in turn loaded the whole operating system. The modern PC performs a similar, albeit much more sophisticated process: when you turn it on, it first runs a program that is permanently wired into a chip in the machine. This loads a small start-up program from disk, which in turn loads the main operating system.
Computer experts adopted the idea of lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps for this process of starting the computer up. In the early days, the initial bit of program code was called a bootstrap loader, but this was soon abbreviated, first to bootstrap, and then to the verb "to boot”. Reboot, for repeating the process, followed shortly afterwards.
(sources: World Wide Words, Wikipedia, Webopedia)
---
SMUGGLE OWAD INTO A CONVERSATION TODAY
say something like:
"We bootstrapped the company with an initial €500,000 investment and after 5 years we're generating more than €50 million a year in sales.”
noun
- a loop of leather, cloth, or synthetic material that is sewn at the side or the top rear of a boot to help in pulling the boot on
- an instance of starting of a computer; a boot
verb
- to promote and develop by use of one's own initiative and work without reliance on outside help
- to boot (a computer)
bootstrapped
adjective
- undertaken or accomplished with minimal outside help
- being or relating to a process that is self-initiating or self-sustaining
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition)
---
WORD ORIGIN
To understand how bootstrap came to be used in the computer world, we must refer to the expression "to lift oneself by one's own bootstraps”, which is the idea of achieving something on your own. Bootstraps are leather loops inside the top of heavy boots that you can pull on in order to get the boot onto your foot. Thus we have the image of getting oneself off the ground by pulling on the bootstraps.
This figurative use of bootstrap may have its roots in the adventures of Baron von Münchhausen and his outrageous tale of pulling himself and his horse out of the swamp by his own hair (instead of his bootstraps). However, the phrase can be found in the U.S. as far back as the mid 1800s and may derive from the picture of the frontiersman or cowboy pulling on his boots in preparation for another day of hard work in the harsh conditions of the Wild West. After all, these people endured one hardship after another, which demanded that they pull themselves up by their bootstraps every day.
In the early days of computing in the 1950s, the phrase was borrowed to describe the difficult process of starting a computer. Since many computer pioneers were avid science-fiction readers, the immediate stimulus may have been a well-known 1941 Robert Heinlein time-travel short story called By His Bootstraps.
The process of bootstrapping a computer involved reading in a short program, either by pressing keys on the console or reading them from paper tape. This series of commands then read in a slightly more complicated program, such as from punched cards. This in turn loaded the whole operating system. The modern PC performs a similar, albeit much more sophisticated process: when you turn it on, it first runs a program that is permanently wired into a chip in the machine. This loads a small start-up program from disk, which in turn loads the main operating system.
Computer experts adopted the idea of lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps for this process of starting the computer up. In the early days, the initial bit of program code was called a bootstrap loader, but this was soon abbreviated, first to bootstrap, and then to the verb "to boot”. Reboot, for repeating the process, followed shortly afterwards.
(sources: World Wide Words, Wikipedia, Webopedia)
---
SMUGGLE OWAD INTO A CONVERSATION TODAY
say something like:
"We bootstrapped the company with an initial €500,000 investment and after 5 years we're generating more than €50 million a year in sales.”
