Today I’m answering a question hardware versus software and a lot of times i get students who are just coming in they’re not quite sure they had some questions and they don’t even know the differences between hardware and software.
That is perfectly okay if you think about it. School, whether it’s high school or college, is the place for you to learn so don’t feel bad about not knowing something instead use this as a way that you can learn about these topics.
So real quickly I do have a previous video for you about Information Technology (IT) vs Computer Science versus it versus Computer Engineering and you can look at that. But let’s talk just real briefly about computer software versus hardware hardware is the physical components of your computer and this can be your CPU this can be your RAM this can be your solid state drive (SSD) or hard drive (HDD) your monitor your mouse your keyboard maybe it’s all combined because it’s a laptop. That is your hardware things that you can physically touch.
Depending upon how you want to work with that that might be an IT type of field or a computer engineering type of field. You might want to study it that’s what you want to work on and that’s a typical thing that a lot of people think about because it is something that they can touch and it’s very tactile and software is more abstract.
Software is going to be the computer programs that are going to run on the hardware so you have to have. You can’t have only hardware you can’t have only software.
Some people don’t care about what hardware they’re using they want to write a program they want to solve a problem and that’s really what software is all about it’s about solving problems and what types of problems are you going to be solving. They could be business types of problems, they can be education based, they can be problems that are kind of esoteric and weird out there that we might run into and computer science is great at those and whether you’re looking at something like blockchain for things like digital currency or you’re talking about being able to sort and search items faster. For example a search engine like Google, or an internal search engine you have to build for your company you’re working for all those types of things are all software and they’re very important you can’t use them without hardware though and so I don’t want to discourage that you have to have a little bit of hardware knowledge just so you know how to write the software but in computer science you will find that 95 plus percent of your time is spent in a software mode and our hardware is just a tool that we use.
The Differences between Hardware and Software for CS Students was originally found on Access 2 Learn
