The Difference Between Hardware and Software

I was in a meeting today where I actually heard this.  “We have chosen this path because software is easier to fix than hardware.”  I had to suppress a chuckle, it was a serious statement made by a serious engineer who was trying to explain why his radar system didn’t work, and how they were going to fix it.

I was drawn back, against my will, to 1984.  I had just returned to Special Operations after four years teaching new officers to be Navigators in the AF.  The base was abuzz with the rumor that a new airplane, the MC-130H, would be delivered by the end of the year and we were on a track to completely modernize the Special Operations MC-130E inventory.  The government was buying new C-130H aircraft from Lockheed, IBM was putting on a new fully integrated glass cockpit, and Emerson Electronics was building a brand new terrain following radar that was going to be 100% better than that old Texas Instruments system on the MC-130E.

I left Hurlburt Field in mid-1986 and the promise of the MC-130H was just around the corner, it would deliver in late 1986, just as soon as they fixed one or two little radar problems.  For the next four years the MC‑130H was to deliver in six months, just as soon as they fixed that one little radar problem.  It was always a newly discovered, easy to fix in software, radar problem.  Meanwhile the 22 C-130’s the Air Force had bought piled up in an airfield in central Texas, waiting to be converted.  They sat there so long that when they started up the engines two of them almost blew their wings off.

So here I am 25 years later listening to that same radar company tell me how simple it will be to fix the problems they have caused with the changes to their radar system.  I guess there really is symmetry to life.  A company can change names, but the same screwed up excuses seem to survive. 

The truth is software appears to be cheap and simple, but can get really complex and expensive very fast.  Once you commit to writing software it is like looking at an iceberg.  You see 10% of what it will really involve.   Hardware on the other hand seems expensive, but it is really simple to understand how to fix something that isn’t working.  For example, take your home computer.  If the hard drive crashes it is pretty easy to figure that out and it may be a bit expensive to replace but a new one will slip right in.  If you have a software problem that keeps causing your computer to crash you can spend hours and hours trying to figure out why.  It can be as simple as how the applications work, but you won’t know that unless you can read the code.