| At the present time the computer is regarded as the most technologically advanced machine used worldwide. It is a tremendous help to everyone in every field of life. It is of importance in medicine, aviation, scientific and technological spheres, finance and so on. We use it to keep in touch with our friends and relatives, to get information we need quickly, to make friends, to get acquainted with other ways of life, to be well-informed about the most important issues and so on. Thus, the computer plays a very essential role in our life.
Since it can perform countless functions simultaneously, it is of a very complicated structure. Two main notions are usually used when the computer is talked about: hardware and software.
Hardware contains practically all devices of the computer, such as the motherboard with the central processing unit, the power supply, the video display controller, the removable media devices (floppy disc, CD-ROM Drive/Writer, DVD-ROM Drive/Writer), the internal storing devices (for instance, hard disc), the sound card, the external components of a computer system (input and output devices). Hardware is something you can see and touch, since the devices exist in the physical world.
For the hardware devices to function as a complete unit an appropriate software is required to take control of the functionality of the devices. Unlike hardware, software is immaterial and contains programs, data, protocols and so on. Software is commonly located on the hard disc and is invoked by the OS to fulfill specified tasks.
Software drivers are computer programmes that are aimed at interacting with the hardware devices. A driver usually deals with a hardware device through the computer bus or communications subsystem that hardware is linked to. As soon as a calling programme invokes a set of instructions in the software driver, the driver issues commands to the device. Having received data from the device, the driver invokes routines in the calling programme. In fact, the driver is designed to simplify programming by functioning as an abstraction layer between a hardware device and an application or the operating system that uses it. Thus, it depends on hardware and is operating system-specific.
The notions software and firmware have much in common and can be interchangeable in some cases. In general, firmware is a specific kind of software that commonly deals with simple operations in a hardware device without which a device would not function.
Taking into account the above stated we can conclude that neither software nor hardware can work separately from the other, because they form a complete unit. |
