3 ms·
It would be my guess that the origin is electrical. A "driver" is a common term for any subsidiary circuit supplying the needs of the components you really care
by hapless 15y ago
It would be my guess that the origin is electrical. A "driver" is a common term for any subsidiary circuit supplying the needs of the components you really care about. (e.g. mosfet driver).
Unlike a particularly driven SO poster, I'm too lazy to try to search for pre-war EE journals or radio magazines where one might find the term.
P.S. There seems to be very few scanned copies of early radio/electronics magazines online. Very sad. I loved leafing through them when I could find them in dead-tree format. Do libraries even archive this tsuff anymore?
- justincormack 15y agoOld magazines are quite fascinating. I spent some time in the university library reading old videotex magazines, that strange precursor to the web. One told about a swear word appearing, the first ever, another of the first ecommerce, unauthorized.
- jonsen 15y agoThat would be my guess too. I came to software engineering from electronics engineering and the meaning of software driver was immediatly obvious to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_circuit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_circuit
- yew 15y agoThe term "driver" as engineering parlance for "something that impels" is also substantially older than electronics. It can be used to refer to tools and to mechanical parts that serve roughly the same purpose as the aforementioned circuits.
- nas 15y agoThat's my guess too. With digital IO, you can say "drive an output pin high". In the old days that was done with transistors (TTL, later CMOS). It's seems logical if you had hardware connected to a digital IO, you could refer to the software as driving the hardware.