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In the modern era the computer is considered the most technologically advanced device frequently used all over the globe. It is a great help to everyone in every field 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 contact our families and friends, to discover information we require fast, to make friends, to get acquainted with other ways of thinking, to be informed about home and foreign affairs and so on. Thus, we are very dependent on the computer in our everyday life.
As it is able to fulfill numerous operations at the same time, it has a very complicated structure. Two major notions are typically mentioned when the computer is talked about: hardware and software.
Hardware includes practically all devices on the computer, inclusive of the motherboard with the central processing unit, the power supply, the video display controller, the removable media devices (floppy disk, CD-ROM Drive/Writer, DVD-ROM Drive/Writer), the internal storage devices (for instance, hard disk), the sound card, the external elements of a computer system (input and output devices). Hardware is something tangible, because the devices exist in the physical world.
To make the hardware devices operate together a software package is needed to manage the functionality of the devices. If compared to hardware, software has no physical form and includes programs, data, protocols and so on and so forth. Software is typically stored on the hard disk and is invoked by the OS to fulfill certain tasks.
Software drivers are computer programs that are aimed at interacting with the hardware devices. A driver commonly communicates with a hardware device with the help of the computer bus or communications subsystem to which hardware is connected. When a calling programme invokes a set of instructions in the driver, the driver gives orders to the device. After receiving data from the device, the driver invokes routines in the calling program. In fact, the driver is intended for simplification of programming by functioning as an abstraction layer between a hardware device and an application or the OS which uses it. Hence, it depends upon hardware and is operating system-specific.
The terms software and firmware have a lot in common and can be interchangeable in certain cases. In general, firmware is known as a specific type of software which supervises simple operations in a hardware device without which a device would not work.
Taking into consideration the above mentioned we can conclude that neither hardware nor software can operate separately from the other, since they form a complete unit. |
