Interface is the part of a system that supports communication with the user. The concept originally came from natural sciences to mean the threshold between states. It was used to describe the contents of a system as a black box, from which only the surface is known, therefore making communication possible only with said surface. Two neighbouring black boxes can only communicate with each other if their surfaces "match up". Nowadays an interface is a shared boundary across which software, computer hardware, peripheral devices, humans and combinations of these exhance information.
In addition for both interacting boxes it doesn't matter how their inner parts read the message and how the response is crafted based on the received input. The understanding is thta a border is a part of the self, and the black boxes need only to know the facing sides in order to insure communication. That matches the original Latin term inter "between" and facies "looks", later anglicized to face.
If one regards any system as a coherent whole, if it's worth-analysing, he will take it down into its individual parts. The position at which the starting and contact points function (upon which communication is established), represent the individual parts. To put them to use, these individual parts have to be put together again to become a greater whole than the sum of its individual parts.
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