9th Class Computers Science Understanding Basic Concepts of Operating System Operating System

  Operating System

An Operating System is a master control program. Basically it is system software that manages the operation of a computer. Without an operating system computer cannot work. The computer is useless unless it is provided with essential software that makes it ready to use. As we have seen that an operating system is software, which makes the computer ready to use by a process called booting. Basically booting is a process which loads operating system from disk to RAM. About twenty years ago Steve Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use at the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Alien came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastically: selling computer operating systems. This was much wider than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Yet, now the company that Gates and Alien founded is selling operating systems like Hindustan Lever Limited sells detergents. New releases of operating systems were launched as if they were Bollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. To be more elaborative on the topic, every general-purpose computer requires some type of operating system that tells the computer how to operate and how to utilize other software and hardware that are installed on to the computer. All software programs developed today require some type of Operating System to operate properly. MS DOS, UNIX and Windows are all examples of operating systems. Because the history of computer operating systems parallels that of computer hardware, it can be generally divided into five distinct time periods, called generations, that are characterized by hardware component technology, software development and mode of delivery of computer services.