The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Von Munchausen’s Computer

New things need new words, but they usually end up with old ones. Computers have been around since at least 1613, when being a computer was a skilled profession practised by mathematicians who worked in observatories adding up numbers.

When Charles Babbage invented the precursor of the modern computer he called it an Analytical Engine, and when his son improved on the design he called it a Mill, on the basis that mills were complicated technical things and that, like his new machine, they took stuff in at one end and spat different stuff out at the other. Then, in 1869, machines that could compute the sum of two numbers began to be called computers, and slowly, as those machines started to do more and more things, the word spread. When the first modern computer was officially christened ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrator And Computer) in 1946, it was already too late.

Early computers were simply calculators, hence the name. Then they got software, which had to be loaded up by the user. Then in the fifties a method was invented whereby a computer would install its own software. The idea was that a single piece of code was loaded, which in turn would load up some more pieces of code, which would load more and more until the computer had … but first we must explain about Baron von Munchausen in the marsh.

Baron von Munchausen (1720–97) was a real person who had fought as a soldier in Russia. On his return home he told stories about his exploits that nobody believed. These included riding on a cannonball, taking a brief trip to the moon, and escaping from a marsh by pulling himself out by his own hair. This latter feat is impossible, for the upward force on the Baron’s hair would have been cancelled out by the downward force on his arm. It’s a nice idea, though, and von Munchausen’s preposterous principle was later taken up by Americans, but instead of talking about hair, the Americans started in the late nineteenth century to talk of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

What’s impossible in physics is possible in computing, and a computer that’s able to load its own programs is, metaphorically, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. In 1953 the process was called a bootstrap. By 1975 people had got bored with the strap, and from then on computers simply booted up.