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.
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