| At present the computer is believed to be the most highly advanced device exploited all over the world. It is a big help to everyone in every sphere of life. It is of great importance in medicine, aviation, scientific and technological spheres, finance and so on and so forth. We use it to keep in contact with our families and friends, to find data we need quickly, to strike up a friendship, to get acquainted with other ways of thinking, to keep well-informed about home and foreign affairs and so on and so forth. So, the computer has a very crucial function in our everyday life.
Since it is able to perform innumerable functions at the same time, it has a very complicated system. Two major terms are typically used when the computer is talked about: hardware and software.
Hardware contains almost all devices on the computer, such as the motherboard with the CPU, the power supply, the video display controller, the removable media devices (floppy disk, CD-ROM Drive/Writer, DVD-ROM Drive/Writer), the internal storing devices (for instance, hard disc), the sound card, the external elements of a computer system (output and input devices). Hardware is something you can see and touch, as the hardware devices exist physically.
To make the hardware devices work together an appropriate software is needed to take control of the functionality of the devices. In comparison to hardware, software is immaterial and includes programmes, data, protocols and so on. Software is typically stored on the hard disk and is invoked by the OS to perform certain functions.
Software drivers are computer programmes that are designed to interact with the hardware devices. A driver typically interacts with a hardware device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which hardware is connected. As soon as a calling programme invokes a routine in the software driver, the driver issues commands to the device. As soon as the device sends back data to the driver, it can invoke routines in the calling programme. In fact, the driver is designed to facilitate programming by operating as an abstraction layer between a hardware device and an application or the OS that uses it. So, it depends on hardware and is operating system-specific.
The words software and firmware are closely related and are interchangeable in some cases. In general, firmware is known as a specific kind of software that takes control of basic operations in a hardware device without which a device is unable to operate.
Taking into consideration the above mentioned we can conclude that neither hardware nor software can work separately from the other, as they make up a complete unit. |
Article Details
