Hardware is the physical machine — the processor, memory, screen and cables you can touch; software is the programs and instructions that tell that machine what to do. A simple memory hook: hardware is hard because it's a solid object, software is soft because it's just changeable code.
The core difference
Hardware is the physical equipment; software is the instructions that run on it.
- hardware — the physical parts of a computer or electronic system: Most of the budget went on hardware rather than licences.
- software — the programs and coded instructions that run on that hardware: You need to update the software before the new features will work.
How to tell them apart
Hardware started out as an ordinary word for metal goods — nails, screws, hinges and locks, the sort of stock sold in a hardware shop — and was later borrowed by computing to describe the physical machine, as opposed to the programs it runs. Software was coined afterwards, in 1958, by statistician John Tukey, who built it from soft plus -ware deliberately as the opposite of hardware: the “hard,” fixed machine versus the “soft,” changeable instructions.
The two terms rarely get confused in everyday use, but they do get mixed up when troubleshooting: a slow computer might be a hardware problem (the processor genuinely can't keep up) or a software problem (a program is badly written or out of date), and diagnosing which one is at fault is the first step to fixing it.
Beyond computing
Hardware also keeps its older sense outside computing, referring to tools and metal fixings sold in a hardware shop, or to heavy military equipment such as weapons and vehicles. Software has stayed almost entirely a computing term.
