But in an environment where there are five, ten, twenty or more computers, buying a license for each computer can be down-right costly. So costly that the temptation to pirate a little software here and there can be pretty tempting. Co-workers are familiar with this temptation and they're often the ones who "share" purchased software among those who need it. If you find that you can't type information into one of these, you can effectively resolve the issue with a technician by calling it an input box, rather than a "white rectangle," or "place to put in text." Button - buttons perform a command after a user clicks them with a mouse. Problems occur when the text of a button is grayed out or if it doesn't appear to sink into the screen when clicked. Sure, computer stores do their best to keep their inventory up to date, but when you can download version 5.6042 of a shareware program as opposed to buying a commercial 3.0 version from the local computer shop, there's just no comparison. Which brings up our next point. Just where does one get shareware? Let's say that every day we need to load up the Yahoo web browser, Microsoft Word, and then the calculator that comes with Windows. Instead of doing this by hand, we could write a batch file to do it for us. First, we'd load up Notepad and type in the following: START "http://www.yahoo.com" START "c:/program files/microsoft office/office/winword. ), it also stored the drivers that the program needed to communicate with the computer's hardware. As you can imagine, the cumbersome process of switching from floppy to floppy prompted the birth of the operating system. An operating system is a software program that controls how the computer's hardware (and installed software) works. Instead of speaking to a human being, chances are that you spoke to a computer that not only responded to what you said and followed the commands that you gave it, it also asked you for more information such as your full name or credit card number. In this case, a person (such as yourself) operated a computer without even knowing it!