Computer Printers

Computer software is a collection of programs and it’s corresponding documentation that is used to perform tasks on a users’ computer. There are three main types of software. Application software is used to perform productive tasks for users such as word processors, desktop publishing, accounting programs and so on. System software communicates with the hardware of the computer to provide the necessary services for application software. A typical example of system software is an operating system, such as Microsoft Windows. There is also programming software which assists a programmer in writing programs using different programming languages in a convenient way.

Application software adds value to a computer and allows the user to be able to do more specific or non computer related tasks. Business and educational software are the most popular forms of application software such as word processors (for example, Microsoft Word), photo editors (Corel Paint) or accounting software (Microsoft Excel). Other applications include industrial software, medical software, databases and computer games.

Applications may be packaged together for convenience and to make it cheap. Computer software put together in this manner is called an application suite and an example of this would be Microsoft Office which includes a word processing program, spreadsheet program and several other applications.

There has been much controversy over the difference between application software and operating systems such as in the court case United States v Microsoft which was settled in an appeals court. Microsoft was originally accused of attempting to monopolise the market by giving a free copy of Internet Explorer, an application software into it’s Microsoft Office suite, an operating system claiming that the operating system wouldn’t work without it.

Some popular brands of application software include Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint, Microsoft Excel, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Mozilla Firefox and thousands more.

System software helps to run the computer system and its hardware. As well as operating systems, system software can include diagnostic tools, servers and utilities. The system software controls the hardware so that the application software can perform correctly. They are used to perform tasks such as transferring data or displaying information.

Programming software assists the programmer in his work writing a program. Software in this category might include text editors, debuggers or compilers. Because programming is done in particular languages and can be a time intensive task, these tools speed up the process and ensure the code that he writes is correct and will work.

Some popular examples of programming software include Apache Ant (a build tool) and Microsoft Visual Studio (compilation and linking tool). The most popular programming languages are Ruby, Perl, Python and Shell.