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Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
Hardware is the transistors inside the computer. These transistors are used as on/off switches, and they are arranged in fundamental building blocks called "logic" which includes such things as gates and flip-flops. With gates and flip-flops, we can create larger structures called registers and comparators and summers and accumulators. These are the building blocks of a sequential logic machine called a computer.
The sequential logic machine, using a sequential timer called a clock, is able to read groups of voltages from registers into a larger block called an arithmetic logic unit (ALU). It then performs some sort of arithmetic or boolean function on those voltages. The output of this arithmetic or boolean function is then stored in another register, and then the ALU does the same thing again on next group of voltages from a long lineup of these voltages. The little groups of voltages are the software. They are arranged in words, which are groups of 16 voltages at a time (for example). A sequence of these words is what we call a program. Software is the name we give to this program. So software is a sequence of groups of voltages which are fed to an arithmetic logic unit one at a time to perform logical arithmetic or boolean functions.
As you can see, it is possible to touch hardware with your fingers, but you can't touch software. You can only touch the media that software is recorded on or the hardware that software runs on.
Software exists in the form of voltages inside the microprocessor, but it can be stored in other forms too. For example, software can be stored as groups of magnetic polarizations of magentic bits of material. This is what is done on a disk drive.
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