Booting#Initial Program Load

With Initial Program Load (abbreviation: IPL; German: introductory (system) program load) is defined as the start of an operating system on direct-attached storage devices, with program so no user program is meant.

In the environment of IBM mainframes, this term was generally used in the past to restart the operating system. A " IPL " meant so far is that the mainframe computer is restarted. The this process performed is similar to the boats at a personal computer. At the German TR 440 mainframe which bluntly stated: bootstart. However, this language must now be rather regarded as historical, because now a simple solution is to call the first stage of the execution of a multi-stage boot loader (called "Stage One" ) as Initial Program Load.

In English, the language used for Initial Program Load is ambiguous and not entirely consistent.