Hardware-Software Interaction: Preliminary Observations

As computational devices continue to advance, there are reasons to examine their foundations a little more deeply, and to ask whether there may not be something more to be found. The fundamental manner in which hardware and software interact is poorly understood, and yet there is little indication in the literature that this is being discussed or explored. In spite of our technological achievements, we are at a loss to precisely define the boundaries between hardware and software, and to describe the nature of their interface. This paper aims to raise some of the major issues and questions, to propose a hardware-information duality, and to suggest directions in which further research might be pursued.