Presently they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: “The Tao lies beyond yin and yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water.
It does not seek fame, therefore nobody knows its presence. It does not seek fortune, for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time.”
Hardware and Software, ashamed, returned to their homes.
— The Tao of Programming, Geoffrey James, 1987
Or, in other words, any code which hooks directly to the hardware on one side and exposes abstractions (like an instruction set) that software can code against on the other.
I always assumed "firm" stuck, as in "You'll have a helluva time changing it, because it's the code that has to deal with all the complex electrical engineering stuff."
(E.g. processor errata, patched board mistakes via fuse or EEPROM, side effects of power supply undervolting or clock skew, or pre-initialized system murkiness)
* hard -> firm -> soft -> wet ware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_(brain)
Although this one is usually just referred to as the "user" ;)
But only because you pointed it out in your comment, thanks.
It's the newest thing, and it's going thermonuclear!
But then please introduce also the relevant variants of realtime (in analogy of hard, firm and soft realtime): vapor realtime and plasma realtime.
Cheers :)