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Just found this one on an old HDD from 2013
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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'Burning' is the act of destructively writing (or burning, since you permanently burn the 1s into 0s on the medium) data to a read-only medium, such as a PROM or later also optical media.
The term seems to have changed since, since you often also 'burn' RW-DVDs even though you really only write, so I wouldn't call it too far fetched to also 'burn' RW-PROMs (aka. EPROMs, or FLASH).
Before you had optical media, you had cable matrices where you could 'write' the matrix once by overloading individual cables, thereby blowing/burning them like a fuse.
Every media is writable at least once, but some media is erasable/re-writable a finite number of times (eg. RW-CDs can be rewritten some 10-100 times and flash can be rewritten some 10000 times).
Since the process of writing to read-only storage is destructible, and since you tended to burn the individual cables in the cable matrix, it became known as 'burning'.
Originally, it had nothing to do with lasers or optical media.