<P> The term is sometimes attributed to a story in Rudolf Erich Raspe's The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but in that story Baron Munchausen pulls himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his hair (specifically, his pigtail), not by his bootstraps--and no explicit reference to bootstraps has been found elsewhere in the various versions of the Munchausen tales . </P> <P> Booting is the process of starting a computer, specifically with regard to starting its software . The process involves a chain of stages, in which at each stage a smaller, simpler program loads and then executes the larger, more complicated program of the next stage . It is in this sense that the computer "pulls itself up by its bootstraps", i.e. it improves itself by its own efforts . Booting is a chain of events that starts with execution of hardware - based procedures and may then hand - off to firmware and software which is loaded into main memory . Booting often involves processes such as performing self - tests, loading configuration settings, loading a BIOS, resident monitors, a hypervisor, an operating system, or utility software . </P> <P> The computer term bootstrap began as a metaphor in the 1950s . In computers, pressing a bootstrap button caused a hardwired program to read a bootstrap program from an input unit . The computer would then execute the bootstrap program, which caused it to read more program instructions . It became a self - sustaining process that proceeded without external help from manually entered instructions . As a computing term, bootstrap has been used since at least 1953 . </P> <P> Bootstrapping can also refer to the development of successively more complex, faster programming environments . The simplest environment will be, perhaps, a very basic text editor (e.g., ed) and an assembler program . Using these tools, one can write a more complex text editor, and a simple compiler for a higher - level language and so on, until one can have a graphical IDE and an extremely high - level programming language . </P>

Who said pull themselves up from their own bootstraps