Mechanical switches are pretty easy to understand—the contacts touch, the current flows, and Bob is, presumably, your uncle. But what about soft switches? Well, they’re not that difficult to understand either, as explained by [EDN].
The traditional softswitch takes input from a momentary single-pole pushbutton and lets you press to toggle power on and off. This operation is easy to achieve with a simple flip-flop constructed with old-school logic to create a “bistable” circuit. That means it will happily remain stable in one of two states unless you do something to make it switch.
