What is Operating System
Posted in General on 06/28/2009 12:37 am by AMAUser
In this article I’m going to help you finally make sense of what for most people is one of the most confusing and least understood computer terms around: “operating system”, or “OS”.
Maybe you’ve found yourself with questions and wonder what OS means,, if so, you’re not the only one.
This actually is a fairly easy concept to get when it’s explained the right way to you, as you’ll find by the time you finish reading this computer dictionary article.
Now an operating system, or OS, is a type of software.
To explain in case you’re not familiar with the term software:
“Software” is all of the parts of the computer that you really aren’t able to observe or touch directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Excel, a Web browser, Windows or the Mac OS, and all of your own files like individual emails, photos, music, and more.
Here’s another way to think about it: hardware is like your brain, a physical part of your body, while software is like your mind or your thoughts — the non-physical part of yourself.
Software runs on hardware, just like your thoughts “run on” your brain.
Are you getting the idea now? So let’s look at the OS specifically.
So, let me give a couple of examples: the two best known OS right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).
Windows Vista and Windows XP are two versions of Microsoft Windows. While Mac OS 10.4 (also known as “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (a.k.a “Leopard”) are two examples of versions of Mac OS X.
Alright then so what is an OS?
Think of it this way: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, and so on, and they also have the instinct to watch, listen, and absorb everything going on around them.
In time, a young person learns to talk and walk by observing others, and as they get older, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, and so on.
Another way to say this is, they go from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the common skills a person needs to learn more specific skills like driving a car, playing a sport like football, writing a paper for a class, getting a job,etc.
In some ways, when you turn a computer on, it’s kind of like a newborn baby, only having one or two built-in “instincts.”
It has the ability to turn on, and display an image on the display, but that’s pretty much it.
The only other thing it can do is look at the hard drive, and if it finds an operating system there, it can start up.
This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and when you’re able to actually start using it.
And the best way to think about it is that it’s just like when a child is born and grows up: the OS contains the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills like walking, talking, reading, writing, etc., that allow everything else to hapen.
So in a sense, it’sas if your PC is “born” and “grows up” in the space of 30 to 60 seconds or so (or longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the operating system.
So, the OS is sort of like those basic skills we all have and learned as kids. More specifically, it’s the software on the computer that draws its desktop, its icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen when you move your mouse around,lets you view files and open them, lets you type, and so on.
Without it, you couldn’t do anything with the PC but push the power button and see an error message like “non system disk or disk error” on a Windows PC, or a flashing question mark on one of Apple’s Macs.
So even though lots of computer users don’t fully understand what an OS is, or what it does, none of us could use a computer without it.
Finally make sense?