Introduction
Hardware software are very common terms that we encounter in our everyday life. Let’s figure out what is the difference between these two. Hardware is any physical device that we are able to touch, and software is a collection of instructions/commands or code and cannot be touched. For example, we use physical mouse to navigate over the web pages that is hardware. While Internet browser that allow us to visit the web page is software. Let’s take a detailed look on each of them.
History
Hardware is something that can be physically touched. These are sold at hardware stores. It is fixed and cannot be altered without replacement or physical modification. Types of hardware include input devices and output devices.
On the other hand, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms and its documentation concerned with the operation of a data processing system, which enables a user to interact with the hardware device, or have the device perform specific tasks for them. Software is code that can be viewed or executed by computer or any hardware device. Usually all the software’s are sold at a retail store or online in the form of disks (floppy diskette, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray) required to install the program on the computer/hardware, manuals, warranty, and other important documentation. An example of software is Microsoft Windows, which is an operating system that allows us to control our computer and other programs that run on it. Computer systems divide software’s into three major classes and these are system software, programming software and application software.
Features
From above discussion it is pretty clear that what are hardware and software, and now we will distinguish between these two. Hardware is a device that is tangible that we can see, and touch, while software is intangible that we can’t see and touch. Hardware has physical characteristics such as color, weight and shape etc. But software lacks these characteristics.
Software is dependent on hardware but hardware is not necessarily depends on software. Software cannot exist without hardware because hardware is used to run the software. There are few hardware that can exist without software. For example turning on light by a switch does not require any software. But if we talk in computer terms, software makes the hardware function properly and to an optimum level.
Hardware is the physical componentry while software is the information stored on the hardware. All storage devices that keep data, store it in some electronic form i.e. hardware while all data in it is software. Hardware understands only binary data or digits like 0 and 1 in the form of voltage pulses, while software tells the hardware everything in the form of binary data or digits. Software programs are created with the help of programming languages such as C, C++, Java, PHP and many more but hardware have nothing to do with these programming language as it understands only binary data. Professionals in hardware are called Hardware Engineers while professionals in Software are called Software Engineers.
Tips and comments
This article is written to help reader in making a distinction between Hardware and Software. These two terms are frequently used. Nowadays with the rapidly developing technologies these two terms have spread their edges to other fields like mobile hardware, software etc. So it is necessary to know these terms and their differences as they are integrally connected. I have tried to explain both of them and their differences above. Hope you would have gained useful knowledge from this article.
