Software: Making sense of transistors

Metaphorically speaking, the hardware is just the calculating machine with a keyboard; it is the software that writes its novel on it. Software' is a collective term for 'programs' or 'algorithms' that tell the machine what to do and how to do it.

The software then turns a computer into the customized work tool that has become an indispensable part of our lives. A scientific definition describes software as "the entirety of information that must be added to the hardware so that the resulting computer system can be used for a defined range of tasks".

Incidentally, the ISO standard defines software not only as the program, but also the documentation of all its functions. This is where the boundary between hardware and software begins to blur again.

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