Relationship Between Hardware and Software

For a computer to produce useful output its hardware and software must work together. Nothing useful can be done with the hardware on its own, and software cannot be utilized without supporting hardware.
To take an analogy, a cassette player and its cassettes purchased from the market are hardware. However, the songs recorded on the cassettes are its software. To listen to a song, that song has to be recorded on one of the cassettes first, which is then mounted on the cassette player and played. Similarly, to get a job done by a computer, the corresponding software has to be loaded in the hardware first and then executed.

Following important points regarding the relationship between hardware and software are brought out by this analogy:

1. Both hardware and software are necessary for a computer to do useful job. Both are complementary to each other.

2. Same hardware can be loaded with different software to make a computer perform different types of jobs just as different songs can be played using the same cassette player.