On the Partitioning of Computing Systems into Communicating Agencies

The paper deals with transparent modelling of information processing systems. Instead of considering hardware and software as the two complementary aspects of the system, the paper considers the physical structure and the informational structure. The informational structure is the abstraction which the human mind associates to the physical structure. In this sense, software also has a physical structure aspect, for example as a magnetic pattern on a disk, and hardware also has an informational structure aspect, for example a group of gates which is interpreted as an adder.