Hardware/Software:
Working with Information on the Computer
In order to get information
in to or out of a computer, you need computer hardware and software.
Hardware - the
physical components
Computer
"hardware" refers to the parts of the computer that you can
see and touch (although you shouldn't touch the interior components without
proper safety precautions).You could think of the hardware as the ingredients
you need to bake a cake, and the software as the recipe that tells you
how to put the ingredients together. Hardware is discussed in the section
called Based on Design. For now we'll concentrate on software.
Software
Software is simply a set of instructions that tell the hardware what
to do. It is written in a language that computers understand. Where the
"letters" are simply the binary 1's and 0's that make up the
individual instructions which form the software programs stored on storage
devices either internally or externally.
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