It’s Patch Tuesday, the day Microsoft and Adobe grace us with new software updates to track, argue about, and maybe someday deploy to our computer systems. But have you ever wondered why we call software updates “patches?” What’s the meaning of the word patch?
The Mark I had patches way back in 1944
It turns out the term goes back a long way. All the way back to the Mark I, an electromechanical computer at Harvard in the early 1940s. The Mark I didn’t use transistors or tubes, it used relays, switches, rotating shafts, and clutches. It wasn’t an electronic computer, it was electromechanical, a step up from Charles Babbage’s designs.
The Mark I read programs from paper tape, where holes punched in the tape represented the individual bits in each instruction. That’s where the computer term “patch” came from. In the event that the program had a bug and needed a minor correction, rather than punch a whole new tape, sometimes you could cover the existing holes containing the error with a bit of new paper or self-adhesive tape, then punch new holes representing new instructions or data over the patch. But if your fix was longer than the original instructions, you had to cut out the part of the tape and splice in a new section.
Later computers sometimes used punch cards. Punch cards could use the same techniques, so the terminology survived.
Old terminology dies hard
It’s been decades since we used paper tape or punch cards to store programs. For that matter, it had been decades since we used paper tape to store programs when Microsoft introduced Patch Tuesday in 2003. The first Microsoft product from 1975 was stored on paper tape, but they soon moved on to magnetic media, followed by optical media and later, digital distribution over the Internet. But old terminology from the early days of computing has ways of sticking. So that’s why we still call software updates patches, even though they are no longer literal patches of paper. I’m not sure how many people even know the terminology dates back more than 80 years.
And that’s why I don’t get too worked up over the save icon in application programs looking like a floppy disk. Not knowing the origins and never having patched paper tape didn’t stop me from patching 800,000 vulnerabilities, maintaining a mean time to remediate of around 21 days, and missing exactly one deadline in my sysadmin days. I could still learn the concept.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.