The Basics of Technology and Computing

Perhaps you had better start from the beginning...

So the start of a blog and where better to begin than the beginning. This is a bit generalised and simplified in places (sometimes techy) but maybe useful, or give another perspective which leads to greater understanding. 

Tech products, whether it be Smartphones, PCs or set top boxes all follow the same construct and basis processes. What makes the differences is how well the construct is built. The quality of components and how well they digitally communicate is what makes a product. This is seen as Software and Hardware.

Hardware

Essentially what we have with hardware is a storage and/or processing of data. Every number, letter, pixel can be expressed as 0s and 1s, and to give a specific output to a user from a specific input. Take the press of a letter on a keyboard. A switched is closed which symbolised by that letter, the data is sent via USB to the storage and processing of which it outputs to other hardware, monitor and hard drive. Quite simply put we take inputs, process them, then receive outputs, where many inputs and outputs can be connected together.

What makes a better or more advanced hardware is the quality of process. This will give 2 improvements:

• Fewer user inputs for equivalent output
• Increased output for equivalent input

With this you can call one bit of hardware awesome, and another rubbish - this should reflect in the price. The increase of output to the decrease of input comes from the processing being more powerful. As processing theoretically becomes more twice as powerful every 18 months (see Moore's Law) this leads to different improvements over this time and at its extremes are:

• A halving of inputs, or
• A doubling of outputs, or
• An equivalent hardware becoming half the price

Software


A system consists several items of hardware that communicate with each other, and do this with through common hardware interfaces (a Bus). This communication is data from the inputs, but this can large amounts of data from the user via software. Therefore some inputs are organised to be automatic, some variable and some user defined. This is done in a huge variety of ways and is know as the User Interface or UI. Often the representation of inputs is depicted or simulated in a visual manner known as Graphical User Interface or GUI. The more inputs that a UI or GUI takes care off, the more intuitive the software. And the more inputs that have to be user defined makes it less intuitive and requires training and learning. 
The opposite of this is the Functionality of a piece of software, as with being able to user define more inputs will make it more functional, whereas having inputs automatically controlled makes it less functional. What we can see from comparing UI and Functionality is that they have a linear relationship. This is fairly obvious, as 100 functions will take twice as long to learn as 50.






So to compare quality in Software is relative. Sometimes the user only requires to input very little, but trades off functionality. Or a system has to be functional as a requirement and therefore requires training in the software. When selecting software look at what you want to do, and then where you sit on the graph. For me and OS's, somewhere between Windows and Undeveloped Distros of Linux. 


Then the Two Come Together


So for any product, software and hardware come together. It's done in too many ways to explain fully, but here are some scenarios. 

1. High Input and Output hardware is easier for user with an intuitive GUI at a cost of functionality. 
2. Several Low Input High Output hardware connected together through a Bus and controlled by a multi functional piece of software, that requires training. 
3. Cheap High Input Low Output devices can be optimised through heavily developed UI software to emulate high performance hardware, and so on.

Often leaps in technology is being creative in these areas, like a smartphone is a load of technologies under one mobile OS, a PC is just a collection of hardware (cards and drives) connected through an interface (motherboard) run under an OS, and a set top box is a static input with firmware to display those different outputs. 


So I hope that was insightful, and help choose products to fit the needs of a user. I mainly created this post as a reference for other articles in discussions. And a quote from my dissertation:

"Superiority of Product is the Perception of the User" 

Dom