Operating Systems 1.0 Summary

Summary Background of Operating Systems(OS)

Anyone with a computer has heard about or is affected by operating systems(OS). The laptops and PC that we buy typically comes pre-loaded with Windows XP. Macintosh computers come pre-loaded with OS X. Many corporate servers use the Linux or UNIX operating systems. PalmOS dominate the portable digital assistance (PDA) space, our cell phones now have operating systems. The operating system (OS) is the first thing loaded onto the computer -- without the operating system, a computer is useless. The purpose of an operating system is to organize and control hardware and software so that the device it lives in behaves in a flexible but predictable way.

How Operating Systems Work

The most common of all OS is the Windows family of operating systems developed by Microsoft, which has several releases or upgrades. Other important OS include the Macintosh operating systems developed by Apple and the UNIX family of operating systems (which have been developed by a whole history of individuals, corporations and collaborators). There are hundreds of other operating systems available for special-purpose applications, including specializations for mainframes, robotics, manufacturing, real-time control systems and so on. At its core an operating system does two things: It manages the hardware and software resource of the system and in the process make demands on the Central Processing Unit.(CPU). Secondly, it provides a stable, consistent way for application to deal with the hardware without having to know all the details of the hardware through a well designed Application Program Interface(API). Today's systems can accommodate thousands of different printers, disk drives and special peripherals in any possible combination facilitated by the operating system.

Just as the API provides a consistent way for applications to use the resources of the computer system, a user interface (UI) brings structure to the interaction between a user and the computer. In the last decade, almost all development in user interfaces has been in the area of the graphical user interface (GUI), with two models, Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows, receiving most of the attention and gaining most of the market share. The popular, open-source Linux operating system also supports a graphical user interface.

The operating system's tasks, in the most general sense, fall into six categories:

• Processor management
• Memory management
• Device management
• Storage management
• Application interface