Firmware is the program on board the camera to run it, it is the operating system so to speak. It is what monitors all the buttons and takes the pictures and reads the data and places it on storage cards. It is called firmware because generally it does not need to be loaded each time, it is, now a days, held in electrically alterable memory. Similar to the old read only memory chips, except the read only memory chips could only be programed once, the electrically alterable memory can be updated by the user.
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