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Hardware and software – two terms you've probably heard of at one point or another.

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The odds are high that you use both on a daily basis, whether it's with your smartphone

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or personal computer.

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Let's take a deeper look at what these two things are and why they're important.

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Hardware is any element of a computer that's physical.

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This includes things like monitors, keyboards, and also the insides of devices like microchips

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and hard drives.

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Hardware is anything that tells hardware what to do and how to do it, including computer

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programs and apps on your phone.

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So video games, photo editors, and web browsers are just a few examples.

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Hardware and software are very different from each other, but they also need one another

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in order to function.

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Let's look at an example of this using a smartphone.

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In this case, the hardware would be the physical phone itself, and the software would be its

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operating system and its apps.

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If we were to take away the software, we would just have a dead phone in our hands.

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It wouldn't be able to make calls, text, or go online because it's not receiving any

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kind of instructions.

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On the other hand, let's say we have no hardware, meaning there's no actual phone.

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If all we have are the programs, we just have a bunch of instructions, but nothing to give

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those instructions to.

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So the big picture here is that hardware needs software to tell it what to do, but software

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also needs hardware in order to act out its directions.

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Technology will continue to evolve, and though we may not be sure of how things will look

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in, say, a hundred years, this combination of hardware and software will be there serving

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as its foundation.