[ Thanks to Timothy R. Butler for this
link. ]
“What makes a computer crash? It can be compared nicely to a
nervous breakdown in humans. When people, for whatever reason, lose
their sense of control and nothing makes sense any more, people
‘crash.’ There is a sense of being so overloaded with demands that
no response will serve any purpose, so one stops responding.
Computers get that way when the heart of the system can’t control
the processes going on in the computer. The heart of a computer
system is called the kernel.“When you first turn on a computer, there is a tiny process
built into the hardware that checks what is there, and where it all
is: mouse, keyboard, video card, etc. This thing is called the
BIOS: Basic Input and Output System. This thing then tries to find
the system installed to run it. Typically, it finds the system on
the hard drive, but more modern computers can look for it on the
floppy (as it was in the old days) or on the CD-ROM…”