| At present the computer is considered the most advanced device frequently used worldwide. It is helpful in every field of life. It cannot be replaced in medicine, aviation, scientific and technological spheres, finance and so on. We start it up to keep in contact with our friends and relatives, to get information we require quickly, to establish relationships, to get acquainted with other ways of thinking, to be informed about home and foreign affairs and so on. Hence, the computer plays a very important function in our everyday life.
As it is able to fulfill innumerable functions at the same time, it is of a very sophisticated organization. Two major words are typically used when the computer is talked about: hardware and software.
Hardware includes almost all devices of 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 disk), the sound card, the external components of a computer system (output and input devices). Hardware is something you can see and touch, since the hardware devices exist physically.
To make the hardware devices operate as a complete unit an appropriate software package is required to control the functionality of the devices. If compared to hardware, software is immaterial and contains programmes, data, protocols etc. Software is typically placed on the hard disk and is invoked by the OS to perform certain functions.
Device drivers are computer programs that are designed to interact with the hardware devices. A driver typically deals with a hardware device by means of the computer bus or communications subsystem to which hardware is linked. As soon as a calling programme invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues orders to the device. When the device directs data to the driver, it can invoke routines in the calling programme. On the whole, the driver is aimed at facilitating programming by functioning as an abstraction layer between a hardware device and an application or the operating system which uses it. Therefore, it depends on hardware and is operating system-specific.
The words software and firmware have a lot in common and can be interchangeable in some cases. In general, firmware is known as a specific kind of software that takes control of simple operations in a hardware device without which a device cannot work.
As seen, neither hardware nor software can function separately from the other, as they form a complete unit. |
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