What is a document?

A document is a unit of your stuff: a photo, a letter, a story, a song, or anything like that.

So a document is the same thing as a file?

Not quite. A file is a unit of any sort of information stored by a computer. A document is a file, but there are also other files that aren't documents.

For example, there'll be lots of files on your computer that aren't even designed to be read by a human—software is made up of files designed to be interpreted by the computer.

How about folders? Is a folder a document?

Nope—a folder (or directory) is a logical grouping of files, used to keep those files organised.

Note that I wrote “files”: any sort of file can be organised into a folder, not just your documents.

There will (most likely) be a folder somewhere on your computer designed to hold all of your documents, typically called something like your “Home” folder, “My Documents”, or “Documents”.

So a document is anything I’d want to print out and keep?

Almost—you can't print music or video (for example), but they're still documents. But, you wouldn't really want to print anything that wasn't a document.

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So: a file is a chunk of information stored by a computer, and a document is any file that represents your stuff.

What is hardware? What is software?

Hardware is anything you can kick: all of the real, physical bits of a computer system. The screen's hardware, the keyboard is hardware, and all the bits inside the main box and the box itself—they're all hardware. Even if you have a furry mouse: it may be soft, but it's not software.

Software, on the other hand, is a lot more slippery. It comprises instructions followed by the computer—software is any bit of a computer system that only exists as data.

All programs are software, and all software is, in some sense, a program. Applications like text editors and web browsers are classic examples of software. But most of the workings of a mobile phone are software too; and so are video recorders' (infamously awkward) interfaces.

All of those esoteric things I wrote about before that are actually computers all run software; there are at least as many different types of software as there are kinds of computer.

So all of my documents are software, right?

Not really. Your documents are… well, documents—they just happen to be written in an electronic binary form that a computer can read and a human can't (without the help of a computer).

Let's say you have a document that reads something like:

A fox and a dog jumped about a bit together …or something—I wasn't really paying attention.

That's definitely a document: it's just a wodge of text. A program, however, would look more like:

PRINT "A fox and a dog jumped about a bit together …or something—I wasn't really paying attention."

See that PRINT? That's an instruction—and that makes it software, because it's telling the computer what to do.

Programs are like a list of verbs for the computer—things to do; whereas documents are just things—nouns.

If you show an idiot a car (a noun), they won't know what to do with it until you say “drive!” (a verb). Similarly, if you give a computer a document, it'll just stare at you blankly, maybe beep a bit, until you tell it what to do with the document.

That's what software does—it tells the computer what to do.

A quick update

Yeah, it's been a while. These Level 0 posts were never meant to take this long at all. I expected them to take a week or so, but then got side-tracked with other things, and dithered.

I've also been forgetting that I can, and—unusually—fully intend to, go back and fix and improve things; so if I write a rubbish entry it doesn't go on the permanent record.

With that in mind…