Yesterday evening I had dinner with some family from out of state. My uncle, aunt and their two kids were visiting from State College, Pennsylvania, where my uncle works as a professor of electrical engineering. His sons were or are already students there, and one of them also went into electrical engineering. My encounters with that part of the family usually end up involving conversations with my uncle or cousin about the relationship between software and hardware, which always has been hard for me to understand. When it comes to learning math and science, I have the intellectual capacity of a shot glass. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t fascinate me. A few days ago, for example, I was gripped by some literature about how LCD screens work.
LCD stands for liquid crystal display, and it’s an imaging technology. When a system sends signals to the display, the display interprets the signals and represents them visually. That much I could have told anyone before a few days ago. But I just learned specifically how this happens, and I’ve been mulling it over since. I think my cousin described the line separating hardware and software as nonexistent. After all, it’s not like hardware is real or present any more so than software is. Understanding this reality helped me understand how an LCD screen works. An LCD screen is a combination of pixels, each of which is composed of clusters of subpixels. This equipment, when paired with backlighting equipment and polarizers, allows for the display of a visible image. That image is the representation of a computer telling the subpixel clusters to vary their intensity. That’s it. That’s all it takes to produce an image.
This technology is often applied in the construction of switches. When overlaid with transparent, electrically-resistive materials, a user can touch his or her finger to a symbol on an LCD touch screen and send an electrical signal to whatever equipment is connected to the screen. The process really is quite simple. It’s so simple that even I can understand it.
