Kickstart

Kickstart can refer to:

Cadence Biomedical

Cadence Biomedical is a medical device company that provides orthotic products to help individuals with severe mobility impairments to walk again. The company is located in Seattle, Washington and was founded in 2007 under the name Empowering Engineering Technologies.

Products

Cadence Biomedical released its first product, the Kickstart Walking System, in August 2012. Kickstart is a wearable device, or orthosis, that gives users stability and the ability to walk independently. The device is intended to improve mobility for those in stroke recovery, or for individuals with neurological injuries such as spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy.is designed to provide walking assistance and stability for those who have difficulty walking, especially if they experience difficulty lifting their knee, catching toes when taking a step, lack of endurance, or problems with coordination, balance, or stability.,

The device uses no external power or batteries to provide assistance, but functions similarly to robotic exoskeletons in that it helps to move the legs forward and augments existing strength. The product was released in 2012 and is available through orthotists in the United States.

Kickstart (Amiga)

Kickstart is the bootstrap firmware of the Amiga computers developed by Commodore.

Most Amiga models were shipped with the Kickstart firmware stored on ROM chips. Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a bootable volume, such as a floppy disk.

Versions

Commodore's AmigaOS was formed of both the Kickstart firmware and a software component provided on disk (with the software portion often termed as Workbench). For most AmigaOS updates the Kickstart version number was matched to the Workbench version number. Confusingly, Commodore also used internal revision numbers for Kickstart chips. For example, there were several Kickstart revisions designated as version 2.0.

Version summary

The first Amiga model, the A1000, required that Kickstart 1.x be loaded from floppy disk into a 256 kB section of RAM called the writable control store (WCS). Some A1000 software titles (notably Dragon's Lair) provided an alternative code-base in order to use the extra 256 kB for data. Later Amiga models had Kickstart embedded in a ROM chip, thus improving boot times. Many Amiga 1000 computer were modified to take these chips.