At what point, and how, does computer hardware touch/move/influence the software?
In: Technology
Depends on how you think of software. Really the distinction between software and hardware is only useful for us humans to simplify the concept of how a computer works. Like the laws of physics, it breaks down once you put a microscope to the low-level mechanics of it all.
If you define software as, the data and applications stored on a medium like a ROM chip, a disk drive or a DVD disc, then this happens constantly. Initially when the computer boots it (more specifically, the CPU) is designed to load instructions from the BIOS. During the boot process the other hardware is initialised, which in turn will load up its own software usually from some kind of ROM. The network processor loads its initial instructions from ROM then awaits further instructions from the CPU, as do the sound processor, graphics processor, etc. These instructions could all accurately be called software, though we tend to use special names for them like “firmware”. Even the CPU itself has its own special firmware that is called microcode.
Eventually the BIOS tells the CPU to load further instructions from the boot drive (which could be a hard disk, an optical drive, a USB drive, a network address…). From there the operating system is loaded which triggers all kinds of software interactions – applications and services to be loaded, log files to be written to etc.
Once you have a loaded operating system, typically you are waiting on the user to provide further input. Ultimately they end up telling the CPU to store some software on a drive or in memory and/or execute it.
So to answer your question, the “when” is, basically from the start of the boot process and then constantly thereafter; and the “how” is, it’s either something the components were hard-wired to do, or it’s something they were told to do based on instructions that were previously stored somewhere.
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