How Hardware and Software Interact

When it comes to our computers few of us stop to think of the operations taking place inside the machine that allows us to play our games, type up our papers or surf the web. We tend to take it for granted that when we push that button our computers will just whirl into life and work perfectly. The truth is that there are many processes and programs that must work together to make that happen. In this article I will discuss some of these processes and try to take the mystery out of them.

We can break our computers down to two parts, these being hardware and software. These two parts have to work in perfect unison for our computers to complete the tasks we set out for them. Hardware is any and all physical parts of our computer, including extra parts like printers and scanners that we may attach to our systems. Some examples of internal hardware would be your hard drive, motherboard, and video card. Alone these pieces of metal can do nothing. They require a set of instructions telling them what to do and how to do it. These instructions come in the form of software.

Software can be broken down even further into three types: BIOS, operating systems, and application software. These three software types work together in order to make our hardware function properly.

We can follow the process used by our software as information passes through our system. The user interacts with the application software which works as a middleman changing the users input into instructions the operating system can understand. The operating system then translates this information into language understandable to the BIOS. The BIOS then turns around and translates these instructions to the computer's hardware allowing the computer to accomplish the task we set before it. This is just a simplified example of how our computer processes data and how our software interacts with itself and with our hardware. You can compare it to a game of Chinese whispers where one person whispers in the ear of the next and so on down the line. Only in this game of whispers the information remains mostly intact and unchanged at the end of the game.