For more useful information

Operating system How stuff works- computer.howstuffworks.com/operating-system.htm

 

Operating system History- www.cbi.umn.edu/iterations/haigh.html

 

Computer Hope.com Operating System- www.computerhope.com/os.htm

 

Operating System What is.com- searchsmb.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid44_gci212714,00.html

 

Webopedia.com Operating Sysems- www.webopedia.com/TERM/o/operating_system.html

 

Wikipedia Operating Systems-  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_systems

 

 

Operating System:

 

What is it?

An Operating System, or OS as abbreviated, is a software program that enables the computer hardware to communicate, manage, and operate with the computer software. Without a computer Operating System, a computer would be useless. Operating systems perform basic tasks, such as recognizing input from the keyboard, sending output to the display screen, keeping track of files on the disk, and controlling disk drives and printers and other devices.

 

Here is a diagram of how an operating system is used amongst the rest of the computer:

 

How Does it Work?

Basicaly, Operating Systems do two main things: It manages hardware and software resources of the system. In a desktop, the processor, memory, disk space and other components are what is managed. It also provides a constent, stable way for applications to work with the hardware without having to know all the details and properties of the hardware.

 

The first task is managing the hardware and software resources, which is very important, because different programs and input commands compete for the central processing unit, or CPU for short, to adhere and listen to first. Whether it be demanding memory and storage, or just input/output.

 

The second main task is to provide and maintain a consistant application interface. A consistant application program interface, or API is important especially when more than one particular type of computer is using the same operating system. But with this API, your operating system is enabled to have a software developer write an application on one computer and be sure that it will run on another computer that is the same type, when the amount of memory and storage between the two computers are different.

 

 

The operating system basicaly is run by the computer user. As you use the computer, your actions are sets of commands that interact with the operating system. For example, the DOS operating system, which is the Windows OS, has commands such as copy and rename for copying files and changing the files names. These commands are accepted and performed by a section of the OS called the command processor. Graphical user interfaces allow you to enter commands by pointing and clicking at objects that appear on the screen.

 

 

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Types Of Operating Systems

 

There are 3 main Operating systems that are used today: Microsoft Windows, Mac Apple, and Linux. Microsoft Windows is manufactured made and developed at the Microsoft Corporation located in Redmond, Washington.

 

 

Microsoft Windows

 

The Microsoft Windows operating systems began as graphical layers on top of the older MS-DOS encoding for the IBM PC. More Recent versions are based on the newer Windows NT(New Technology) core that first took shape in OS/2(Operating System/2) and borrowed from VMS minicomputer operating systems. Windows runs on 32-bit and 64-bit Intel and AMD processors. The most widely used Windows family is Microsoft Windows XP, released in October of 2001. After more than 5 years of development work, Microsoft released Windows Vista, a major new version of Microsoft Windows which contains a large number of new features and architectural changes. Chief amongst these are a new user interface and visual style called Windows Aero, a number of new security features such as User Account Control, and new multimedia applications such as Windows DVD Maker.

 

 

Mac OS

 

Mac Apple, which is the new Macintosh, is located in Cupertino, California. Mac OS X is a line of privately owned graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc., which is the latest of operating systems pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS, which had been Apple's main and primary operating system since 1984. The operating system was first released in 1999 as Mac OS X Server 1.0, with a desktop-oriented version (Mac OS X v10.0) following in March 2001. Since then, four more distinct "end-user" and "server" editions of Mac OS X have been released, the most recent being Mac OS X v10.4, which was first made available in April 2005.

 

 

Linux, which is an operating system that was created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linux is a bit different from Windows and Apple in the sense the Linux is freely available to anyone on the web. The fact that it is on the web, it is used all around the world and is very vresitile. you can download a live CD version caslled Knoppix, which is able to be booted from the CD drive on startup.

 

 

Microsoft Windows XP Software Kit	Mac OS X Operating System	Linux Operating System Screenshot

             

 

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History Of Operating Systems

 

The first computers never used Operating Systems, the user had sole use of the machine and would arrive armed with program and data, often on punched paper and tape. The program would be loaded into the machine, and the machine would be set to work until the program completed or crashed.

 

Through the 1960s however, several major concepts were developed, advancing the development of operating systems with the creation of Mainframes. The development of the IBM System/360 produced a group of mainframe computers available in differing capacities and price points, for which a single operating system (OS/360) was able to do. This concept of a single OS spanning an entire product line was key for the success of System/360 and, in fact, IBM's current mainframe operating systems are distant descendants of this original system. In fact, applications written for the original OS/360 can still be run on modern machines.

 

OS/360 also contained another important advance: the development of the hard disk permanent storage device (or IBM DASD). Another key development was the concept of time-sharing: which is the idea of sharing the resources of expensive computers amongst multiple computer users interacting in real time with the system. Time sharing allowed all of the users to have the illusion of having exclusive access to the machine.

 

The Multics timesharing system created in 1964, was the most famous of a number of new operating systems developed to take advantage of the concept. Multics, particularly, was an inspiration to a number of operating systems developed in the 1970s, notably Unix by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. Another commercially-popular minicomputer operating system was VMS. By the 1990s, the microcomputer had evolved to the point where, as well as extensive GUI facilities, the strength and flexibility of operating systems of larger computers became increasingly desirable. Microsoft's response to this change was the development of Windows NT, which served as the basis for Microsoft's desktop operating system line starting in 2001. Apple rebuilt their operating system on top of a Unix core as Mac OS X, also released in 2001. Hobbyist-developed reimplementations of Unix, assembled with the tools from the GNU Project, also became popular. Versions based on the Linux kernel are by far the most popular. The growing complexity of embedded devices has led to increased use of embedded operating systems. An embedded operating system is basically a special-purpose computer system designed to perform one or a few special functions. An example of an embedded system is a router located to the right.