footprint

footprint n.

1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware. 2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, `footprints'). See also toeprint. 3. RAM footprint: The minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other program takes; this figure gives one an idea of how much will be left for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is another matter entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of making it nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully, limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual memory - ESR]

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Footprints, the footmarks or imprints left at inconceivably remote periods by the feet of various animals on the wet clay or sand of sea-beaches or similar localities, and which are now found at various levels in the solid strata of the earth. The footprints in the Silurian and other very antique rocks are mostly those produced by the claws of crustaceans. In the Triassic rocks of Connecticut, the footprints of 32 or more species of bipeds, and 12 of quadripeds, have been found.

Entry from Everybody's Cyclopedia, 1912.

Foot"print` (?), n.

The impression of the foot; a trace or footmark; as, "Footprints of the Creator."

© Webster 1913.