What is an Operating System?

By Tyler Downer
2/9/08

The Heart of the matter

An operating is at the same time the most familiar and strangest part of your computer. You use it every time you touch a computer, but you probably don't know exactly what it is. First off, I will tell you about the 3 major types of operating system, then how an Operating System(or OS) works.

The families

Operating Systems come in 3 groups, known by their brands. First, the largest and most well known group, is Microsoft Windows. This family includes, MS-DOS, rarely used by itself anymore, Widows 98, XP and Vista. You most likely use a Widows computer. Next is Apple Macintosh. Less popular than Windows, Macs as their known, have a large user base nonetheless. Lastly there is Unix/Linux. Unix is mostly used by large companies wanting a stable OS and Linux, which is free, is used by everyone from home users to supercomputers. Now, what does and OS do and how?

The brain

An OS is the software that makes the hardware in your computer, the actual stuff in the box, do things. If you had a computer without an OS, you could turn it on and off, and not much else. It would be mainly a hunk of tin, plastic and gold sitting in a pretty box. An expensive and inefficient heater. Add an Operating System and your hunk of metal has the potential to be the fastest computer in the world. An OS processes instructions, from a keyboard, mouse, or program(which need an OS to run) and turns them into language the computer can understand and process so it benefits you. Lets say you are typing. You open your word processor, type a few words, than want to save it. An OS opens your word processor, understands what you type and tells the computer to put it on the screen, and then tells the computer to save it to the hard drive. It does much more than this, put it would take a while to tell you all it does. Now many people believe the OS is everything that is on their computer. This is not true. An OS is simply a platform to run programs and execute commands with. It may come with programs, but even the background of your computer is not the true OS. Many Operating Systems used to be run with text only terminals, meaning you typed out what every you wanted the computer to do. As you can see, Operating Systems have advanced a long way, but they are still Operating Systems.

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