What is an Operating System
At the simplest level, an
operating system does these things:
It manages the hardware and
software resources of the system. In a desktop computer, these resources
include such things as the processor, memory, disk space, etc.
It provides a stable, consistent
way for applications to deal with the hardware without having to know all the
details of the hardware.
The first task, managing the
hardware and software resources , is very important, as various programs and
input methods compete for the attention of
the central processing unit (CPU) and demand memory, storage and
input/output (I/O) bandwidth for their own purposes. In this capacity, the
operating system plays the role of the good parent, making sure that each
application gets the necessary resources while playing nicely with all the
other applications, as well as husbanding the limited capacity of the system to
the greatest good of all the users and applications.
The second task, providing a
consistent application interface, is especially important if there is to be
more than one of a particular type of computer using the operating system, or
if the hardware making up the computer is ever open to change. A consistent
application program interface (API) allows a software developer to write an
application on one computer and have a high level of confidence that it will
run on another computer of the same type, even if the amount of memory or the
quantity of storage is different on the two machines.
The most popularly used operating systems are Linux OS, Windows and
Macintosh, Sun Solaris.
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