

Origin of the term “driver” in computer science - gioele
http://english.stackexchange.com/a/56208

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hapless
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?

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nas
That'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.

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ck2
Pretty sure the PDP-8 had the ability to use different peripherals off it's
bus and therefore needed code for each one.

PDP-8 was mid-1960s so check it's manual and manual for its peripherals.

Maybe the word "driver" was borrowed from magnetic tape drivers?

There are also "solenoid driver boards" in the PDP8 so the word has a logic
circuit meaning too.

Gate drivers and SCR drivers, etc. all physical circuits before software. So
software borrowed the concept.

