1971 K. Thompson & D. M. Ritchie Unix Programmer's Man. 3 Nov. §11. 13 in (O.E.D. Archive) Name boot— reboot system... Description boot logically a command, and is kept in /etc only to lessen the probability of its being invoked by accident... It reboots the system by jumping to the read-only memory, which contains a disk boot program.

1978 57 2185 A fairly large fraction of these users..are capable of ‘ re-booting ’ the operating system.

1980 28 Nov. 24/3 It is a command to stop in our tracks and relinquish everything we have written to the maw of the computer until it can be rebooted , whatever that means.

1985 May 96/3 The user simply unplugs the failed peripheral, then reboots the system.

1993 J. Pournelle & S. M. Stirling 209 I'll dump it and reboot from worm .

1997 P. Cornwell xv. 346 She was already rebooting and going into dos . Knowing her, she would have that password removed in minutes.