Loading

Loading is the act of placing a force or burden upon an object or network.

More specifically, loading may refer to:

In biology:

In engineering:

Loader (computing)

In computing, a loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs and libraries. It is one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, as it places programs into memory and prepares them for execution. Loading a program involves reading the contents of the executable file containing the program instructions into memory, and then carrying out other required preparatory tasks to prepare the executable for running. Once loading is complete, the operating system starts the program by passing control to the loaded program code.

All operating systems that support program loading have loaders, apart from highly specialized computer systems that only have a fixed set of specialized programs. Embedded systems typically do not have loaders, and instead the code executes directly from ROM. In order to load the operating system itself, as part of booting, a specialized boot loader is used. In many operating systems the loader is permanently resident in memory, although some operating systems that support virtual memory may allow the loader to be located in a region of memory that is pageable.

Loading screen

A loading screen is a picture shown by a computer program, often a video game, while the program is loading or initializing.

In early video games, the loading screen was also a chance for graphic artists to be creative without the technical limitations often required for the in-game graphics. Drawing utilities were also limited during this period. Melbourne Draw, one of the few 8-bit screen utilities with a zoom function, was one program of choice for artists.

Loading times

Loading screens that disguise the length of time that a program takes to load were common when computer games were loaded from cassette tape, a process which could take five minutes or more. Nowadays, most games are downloaded digitally, and therefore loaded off the hard drive meaning faster load times, however, some games are also loaded off of an optical disk, faster than previous magnetic media, but still include loading screens to disguise the amount of time taken to initialize the game in RAM.

Because the loading screen data itself needs to be read from the media, it actually increases the overall loading time. For example, with a ZX Spectrum game, the screen data takes up 6 kilobytes, representing an increase in loading time of about 13% over the same game without a loading screen.