Booting Up

Driving to work this morning, and perhaps impelled by the need to get myself booted up for the day, I spontaneously wondered about the etymology of the phrase, "to boot up." I guessed, rounding the corners on Highway 19 into Northfield, that it derived somehow from "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps," and it turns out that's right. From the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, the etymology of "boot":

To load and initialise the operating system on a computer. Normally abbreviated to "boot". From the curious expression "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", one of the legendary feats of Baron von Munchhausen.

Here's another, more musing take on the etymology.