Hardware: Closer to software than you think

To put it simply, in the IT sector everything that can be touched is hardware. Nevertheless, all hardware also has plenty of 'intelligence' because a wide range of logical functions are already integrated into the processor, monitor or graphics card. The distinction between 'hardware' and controlling 'software' is therefore not clear-cut, but rather fluid. Incidentally, particularly simple hardware systems are called 'firmware' (coffee machines, kitchen stoves, etc.).

In the IT sector, computer hardware today includes the following components, among others:

- Motherboard
- Chipset
- processor
- Memory
- disk drives
- graphics card
- Sound card
- monitor
- printer
- keyboard
- Mouse
- Loudspeaker
etc.