An original character from DC's Milestone Comics imprint, he first appeared in Hardware #1 (April 1993), and was created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan.

[2] Curtis Metcalf is a genius inventor who, in his Hardware identity, uses a variety of high-tech gadgets to fight organised crime.

[1] Metcalf was a working class child prodigy who was discovered aged 12–13 by a big-time businessman, Edwin Alva Sr., who with the blessing of Curt's parents, enrolled him in A Better Chance, "a program intended to get minority students into elite prep schools".

[3] After a few years, and wanting a share of profits earned by his inventions, Metcalf asked Alva for a "royalty point or two".

My benefactor and role model, the economic savior and humanitarian pillar of the city of Dakota, has connections to organized crime.

[3] Then he waited a while for the fireworks, but learned that Alva was too big; the law wouldn't dare go after him and the media refused to run any story that might incur his wrath.

[4][5][6][7][8][9] Curtis Metcalf is given a superhuman power from hardware that fuses with his body which is a battle suit of armor from a futuristic advanced technological alien planet.

When no longer needed, the battle suit armor is disassembled, converted back to energy, and then stored in the Info Tool's structural files.

[10] It consists of a self-designed metal alloy, is resistant to bullets and energy, increases Hardware's strength via flexible polymers, and can fly via jet boots.

[3][7][10] Furthermore, the armor's helmet includes a spectral scanning unit, a radio receiver,[10][11] radar,[12][13] a chemical analyzer,[14] a digital video player/recorder,[15] a translator, and a voice modulator.

[7] Other weapons Hardware uses less frequently include tasers,[26] timed explosives,[3] shoulder-mounted tranquilizer dart launchers,[38] a liquid oxygen-fueled flamethrower,[22] a micro-rocket (a small rocket that attaches to an opponent's back and then launches him helplessly into the air),[3] a remote-controlled thruster unit (a miniature jet thruster that latches onto a fleeing vehicle and causes it to spin wildly out of control),[25] a rocket pistol,[22] a kusarigama,[32] a blinding laser pen, a neural net cannon (that produce effects like the omnicannon's neural net shells),[28] a machine gun that fires explosive bullets,[15] a "nova burst" (an extremely powerful directed energy weapon),[39] a remotely-controlled Hardware robot,[40][41] a power source shield that protects his armor from energy-draining weaponry,[7] and a field of supercool atoms that can trap and immobilize energy beings like Doctor Light.