Hardware and Software

Hardware and Software:

Hardware is anything that helps the computer to run the software. It refers to objects that you can actually touch, like disks, disk drives, RAM, PCI slots, VGA Chips, display screens, keyboards, printers, motherboards, and chips. In contrast, software is untouchable. Software exists as ideas, concepts, and symbols, but it has no substance. Books provide a useful analogy. The pages and the ink are the hardware, while the words, sentences, paragraphs, and the overall meaning are the software. A computer without software is like a book full of blank pages, you need software to make the computer useful just as you need words to make a book meaningful.Operating system, Programs like MSWORD, MSEXCEL, ORACLE, FREEHAND are some examples of software.

The distinction between software and hardware is sometimes confusing because they are so integrally linked. Clearly, when you purchase a program, you are buying software. But to buy the software, you need to buy the Disk (hardware) on which the software is recorded.