Plural of hardware; metal goods and equipment, or the physical electronic components of computers and devices.
From 'hard' (Old English heard, firm) + 'ware' (Old English waru, goods). The term 'hardware' originally referred to metal goods in the 1500s, later applied to computer components in the 1960s.
The word 'hardware' cleverly parallels 'software'—when computers arrived, technologists needed to distinguish between the tangible physical machine and the intangible programs running on it, borrowing metaphors from the hardware store world.
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