Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
Initial Program Load.
I can't remember the exact words, but she had a variant which was something like "restrap and then IPL". I know that is why we talk about rebooting, since there were cables that crossed over like a book strap. No point asking my mum, she didn't have a clue what it meant at the time!
That should have been bootstrap and IPL. Booting (and rebooting) is an abbreviation of bootstrapping (comes from the phrase "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps") - which on my old PDP-11 would require the operator to manually set the binary machine code, using phycial swicthes, one instruction at a time to instruct the system to load the OS from a Winchester drive.