1891 R. P. Chope Dial. Hartland, Devonshire 29 Boot-strap, a boot-lace.

1908 Daily Chron. 11 Sept. 7/5 He put her up, adjusted boot-strap and skirt.

1922 J. Joyce Ulysses iii. xvi. [Eumaeus] 601 There were..others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps.

1936 S. J. Kunitz & H. Haycraft Brit. Authors 19th Cent. 213/1 A poet who lifted himself by his own boot-straps from an obscure versifier to the ranks of real poetry.

1937 V. D. Scudder On Journey iii. ii. 306 Humanity could never pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

1960 D. Lessing In Pursuit of Eng. 35 I had no money, I could have got some by writing to my family, of course, but it had to be the bootstraps or nothing.

1962 Listener 23 Aug. 271/2 A rather naïve faith in humanity's ability to pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

1953 Proc. IRE 41 1273/1 A technique sometimes called the ‘bootstrap technique’…Pushing the load button..causes one full word to be loaded into a memory address previously set up..on the operator's panel, after which the program control is directed to that memory address and the computer starts automatically.

1962 Gloss. Terms Automatic Data Processing (B.S.I.) 42 Bootstrap, 1. A form of program input in which simple preset computer operations are used to read in initial instructions which in turn cause further instructions to be read until the complete program is assembled. 2. The process of using parts of a compiler to construct the remainder of the same compiler.

1965 K. Nicol Elem. Programming iii. 11 When the computer was constructed, a small set of basic instructions were permanently wired into the store and the control unit is made to obey the first of these by pressing an external button. They constitute a small program (known as the ‘bootstrap’ or ‘initial input’ routine) whose task is to read characters from the paper tape reader and place them in successive storage locations.

1975 R. H. Eckhouse Minicomputer Syst. vi. 167 The software bootstrap for the PDP–11 is a sequence of instructions for loading user programs…The bootstrap loader source program is shown in Fig. 6–4.

1980 C. S. French Computer Sci. xxiv. 183 Bootstraps or Bootstrap loaders are very simple loaders which are either placed in memory manually by use of the console or placed in memory by a special piece of hardware.

1984 J. Hilton Choosing & using your Home Computer 79/2 The bootstrap's job is simply to find the main DOS on the disk, and transfer it byte by byte into RAM, whereupon that DOS can take over and perform some far more sophisticated functions.

1946 Jrnl. Inst. Electr. Engineers 93 iii a. 308/1 The ‘Bootstrap’ Circuit..is much used for generating a linear rise of voltage with time, for time-base and other purposes... It is called a ‘bootstrap’ circuit because the potential at A is apparently being ‘pulled up by its own bootstraps’.

1949 Electronic Engin. 21 198 The bootstrap valve may be anode loaded to obtain the push-pull output.

1949 R. Kelner in B. Chance et al. Electronic Time Measurements v. 125 (heading) Bootstrap Triangle Generator with Diode Comparator.

1958 Communications Assoc. Computing Machinery 1 22 Some interesting techniques have been developed whereby it would be possible for a new computer group to ‘boot-strap’ itself into a position of automatic programming capability upon receiving a new machine.

1960 Communications ACM 3 607/1 In December, 1958, a hand-coded version of Neliac..compiled its first rudimentary code for the Remington Rand Univac Countess. By May 1959 it..was being used to ‘bootstrap’ itself, i.e., an improved version is written in Neliac language..and then recompiled by itself.

1983 Sci. Amer. May 107/2 The prospect of bootstrapping the entire process of data analysis offers hope that an extremely difficult problem will begin to yield.

1983 Fortune 30 May 59/2 Using American Jet's earnings for that year as collateral, Paulson bootstrapped his way into bank loans to buy..the then-unprofitable corporate-jet subsidiary of Grumman Corp.

1983 New Scientist 23 June 873/2 This profound question of a self-creating Universe which somehow bootstraps itself into existence using quantum indeterminism as the straps.

1978 Pract. Computing July–Aug. 42/3 The system is boot-strapped as soon as the power is turned on.

1984 Simon & Matthews Mastering Electron vii. 148 If such a system crashes it has to be ‘bootstrapped’ from the disc to start it again.

1960 Aeroplane 98 147/2 The particular process is not, strictly speaking, ‘bootstrapping’, which in rocket parlance merely means that the engine runs as a self-contained unit, using its own propellents in one way or another to drive its pumps.

1962 J. H. Simpson & R. S. Richards Physical Princ. Junction Transistors xiii. 317 The process of multiplying the apparent value of a resistance by applying nearly equal signal voltages to each end is known as ‘bootstrapping’.