Hardware Needs Software to Work

Hardware refers to the computer's physical components, like the monitor, keyboard, memory chips, motherboard and hard drive. Software is the set of instructions which tells the hardware to accomplish a task, software uses hardware for four basic functions: input, processing, storage and output.Hardware components must communicate with both data and instructions among themselves.

A computer user interacts with the computer in a way that the user and the software understand, like entries made from the keyboard and the mouse.

Although, software must convert those instructions into a form which hardware can understand. All of the communication between hardware and software, or between software and other software is reduced to a yes or no, inside the computer this is represented as two simple states: on and off.

The technology of storing and reading only two states is called binary, and the number system which uses only two digits, 0 and 1, is called the binary number system.

A 1 or 0 in this system is called a bit, or a binary digit. Because of the way the number system is organized, grouping is usually done in groups of eight bits, each group is called a byte.

With a computer, all counting and calculations use the binary number system. Counting in binary goes like this: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, and so on. all letters and characters are converted to a binary code before being stored on in a computer. An example is the uppercase letter A in binary code is 0100 0001, and the number 25 is 0001 1001.