| In the modern era the computer is regarded as the most highly advanced machine exploited all over the globe. It is helpful in every sphere of life. It cannot be replaced in medicine, aviation, science and technology, finance and so on and so forth. We start it up to contact our families and friends, to get information we require fast, to strike up a relationship, to explore the world around us, to keep informed about the most important issues etc. Hence, we greatly depend on the computer in our everyday life.As it is able to fulfill countless functions at the same time, it is of a very complicated organization. Two major terms are commonly used when the computer is spoken about: hardware and software.Hardware contains almost all devices of 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 example, hard disc), the sound card, the external elements of a computer system (input and output devices). Hardware is something you can see and touch, as the hardware devices exist in the physical world.To make the hardware devices function as a complete unit a software is required to manage the work of the devices. Unlike hardware, software is immaterial and contains programmes, data, protocols etc. Software is typically stored on the hard disk and is invoked by the operating system to perform certain functions.Device drivers are computer programmes that are intended for interaction with the hardware devices. A driver usually interacts with a hardware device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which hardware is linked. As soon as a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device. After obtaining data from the device, the software driver invokes routines in the calling program. In general, the driver is intended for simplification of programming by operating as an abstraction layer between a hardware device and an application or the operating system that uses it. Therefore, it is dependent on hardware and is operating system-specific.The terms software and firmware have a lot in common and are interchangeable sometimes. In fact, firmware is known as a specific kind of software that supervises basic operations in a hardware device without which a device is unable to function.To summarize, neither hardware nor software can work separately from the other, since they form a whole. |
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