| In the third millenium the computer is considered the most technically advanced machine exploited all over the world. It is a big help to everyone in every field of life. It cannot be replaced in medicine, aviation, scientific and technological spheres, finance and so on and so forth. We use it to keep in touch with our friends and relatives, to discover information we need at a swit rate, to strike up a relationship, to get acquainted with other ways of life, to be informed about the most important issues and so on. So, the computer plays a very essential role in our life.
As it is able to perform numerous functions at the same time, it has a very sophisticated structure. Two major words are typically mentioned when the computer is spoken about: hardware and software.
Hardware includes almost all devices on the computer, inclusive of 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 storage devices (for instance, hard disc), the sound card, the external elements of a computer system (output and input devices). Hardware is something tangible, because the devices exist physically.
For the hardware devices to work as a complete unit an appropriate software package is needed to take control of the work of the devices. If compared with hardware, software has no material form and contains programmes, data, protocols and so on and so forth. Software is commonly placed on the hard disc and is invoked by the operating system to fulfill specified functions.
Device drivers are computer programs which are designed to interact with the hardware devices. A driver typically interacts with a hardware device via the computer bus or communications subsystem that hardware is linked with. When a calling programme invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device. After obtaining 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 that uses it. Therefore, it depends on hardware and is operating system-specific.
The notions software and firmware are closely related and are interchangeable in certain cases. In fact, firmware is known as a specific kind of software which is usually involved with basic operations in a hardware device without which a device is unable to operate.
To summarize, neither software nor hardware can operate separately from the other, since they make up a whole. |
