What is Software?

We are living in an information society where most people are engaged in activities connected with either producing or collecting data, or or gangling, processing and storing data, and retrieving and disseminating stored information, or using such information for decision making. Great developments have taken place in computer  hardware technology, but the key to make this technology useful to humans lies with the software technology. In recent years software industry is exhibiting the highest growth rate throughout the world, India being no exception. Software is the general term for information that's recorded onto some kind of medium. For example, when you go to the video store and rent or buy a tape or DVD, what you're really getting is the software that's stored on that tape or disk. Your VCR or DVD player are hardware devices that are capable of reading the software from a tape or disk and projecting it onto your TV screen, in the form of a movie. Your  computer  is a hardware device that reads software too. Most of the software on your computer  comes in the form of programs. A program consists of instructions that tell the  computer  what to do, how to behave. Just as there are thousands of albums you can buy on CD for your stereo, and thousands of movies you can buy to play on your VCR or DVD player, there are thousands of programs that you can buy to run on your  computer . When you buy a computer, you don't automatically get every program produced by every software company in the world. You usually get some programs. For example, when you buy a computer it will probably have an operating system already installed on it. If you do purchase a specific program, it would be to perform some specific task. For example, you might use a graphics program to touch up photos, or you might use a word processing program to write text. You're using your Web browser program right now to read this text. Just as there are umpteen different brands of toothpaste, there are umpteen different brands of word processing programs, graphics programs, and Web browsers.