In a computer, information, techniques and procedures not contained in ROM and not included with the operating system, are supplied by supplementary software. According to Aquinas, angels continually and unendingly receive habitual impressed species directly from God as a supplement to the connatural knowledge which they have through their own essence. There are some limitations to their knowledge of other intellective beings, however. Later versions of software are usually able to do all the things that earlier versions of the same software could do. In like manner, angels are characterized as having the ability to know and do multiple things at once.
Ethernet cards have a similar function.
Signals are sent out and coordinated, and as a result commands can be processed, binary and text files can be transferred, etc. In the angelic hierarchies, the gifts of grace among separate substances must always be proportional to the gifts of nature, unlike the case with humans, where, for example, someone with little native intelligence could be much more generously endowed with grace than a highly gifted individual. And so, communication always takes place from the naturally superior to the naturally inferior. But, as was mentioned above, the communication does not involve the transmission of new species, but only an intensification of illumination. Finally, one cannot help seeing an analogy between the various internal and external hardware caches and software caches, which help to increase computing speed by providing a route for signals to avoid getting slowed down in hard-disk swap files or other storage operations.