the.com/hardware
the only part of the computer you can throw across the room when it betrays you
means The physical, tangible components of a computer or machine — the chips, drives, boards, and casings you can actually touch — as opposed to the software that runs on them.
from A plain English compound, older than any computer: 'hard' plus 'ware' (goods, wares), it once meant exactly what it says — durable metal goods like nails, tools, hinges, and pots, the stuff of the corner ironmonger's shop. When computing arrived in the mid-20th century, engineers borrowed the term for the solid, physical machinery, and then coined 'software' as its playful opposite for the intangible code. So a word that spent centuries meaning hammers and hinges quietly became the name for the box on your desk.
- origin
- term predates computers, meant nails and tools
- first bug
- 1947 glitch was a literal moth in a relay
- moore's law
- transistors doubled roughly every two years for decades
- weight loss
- early hard drives weighed over a ton
- silicon
- chips are made from purified beach sand
intel core i9-14900k — flagship desktop processor with 24 cores, released 2024
nvidia rtx 4090 — professional graphics card with 24gb vram, launched 2022
apple m3 max — 12-core chip in macbook pro and mac studio, 2023