Hardware

Full definition of hardware

(uncountable)

Fixtures, equipment, tools and devices used for general-purpose construction and repair of a structure or object. Also such equipment as sold as stock by a store of the same name, e.g. hardware store.He needed a hammer, nails, screws, nuts, bolts and other assorted hardware, so he went to the hardware store.
(informal) Equipment.military hardware

2003, June 6, Mission to Mars, BOWEN: The monster trucks of Mars rovers, joke scientists, equipped with an array of sophisticated hardware to look for signs of water and answer scientists questions.
2009, May, Lee S. Langston, plowing new ground., It is one thing to see an intercooler as a simple entry in a textbook, but to witness the actual hardware as it crawled down the road was awe-inspiring.
2011, January, Swedish Sportster, Smaller, turbocharged engines are one way to increase engine efficiency by 8 to 10 percent, but the extra hardware is expensive.

(computing) The part of a computer that is fixed and cannot be altered without replacement or physical modification; motherboard, expansion cards, etc. Compare software.

1952, "Binary Arithmetic", R.L. Michaelson, in The Incorporated Statistician, vol. 3, no. 1 (Feb. 1952), pp 35-40.Hardware is the generally accepted colloquism for anything inside a computer other than an engineer.