From WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) [wn]:
footprint
n 1: a mark of a foot or shoe on a surface; "the police made
casts of the footprints in the soft earth outside the
window" [syn: footmark, step]
2: a trace suggesting that something was once present or felt
or otherwise important; "the footprints of an earlier
civilization"
3: the area taken up by some object; "the computer had a
desktop footprint of 10 by 16 inches"
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Footprint \Foot"print`\, n.
The impression of the foot; a trace or footmark; as,
"Footprints of the Creator."
[1913 Webster]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 Sep 2003) [foldoc]:
footprint
1. <jargon, hardware> The floor or desk area taken up by a
piece of hardware.
2. <jargon, storage> The amount of disk or RAM taken up by
a program or file.
3. (IBM) The audit trail left by a crashed program (often
"footprints").
See also toeprint.
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-25)
From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]:
footprint
n.
1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware.
2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in
plural, footprints). See also toeprint.
3. RAM footprint: The minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other
program takes; this figure gives one an idea of how much will be left
for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is another
matter entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat
can expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of making it
nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully, limited to
operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual memory -- ESR]