Operating Systems Basics
Operating Systems controls everything on your computer—nothing is safe from this mysterious force we call the Operating System (OS). We take a look behind closed doors to see what’s really going on in your computer.
Purpose of Operating System
Imagine this: you’ve bought a shiny new PC, and you are quite happy with it—your favourite programs run just fine, and life in general looks good. Soon, of course, your PC will become too slow to run the latest versions of your applications, and you will need to upgrade. You’ve changed your motherboard and processor and now fire up the program, only to realize that it doesn’t work! Believe it or not, this actually used to happen.
Programming for a computer usually meant knowing all the details about the hardware, and should that hardware change, programs would become useless and would have to be rebuilt to suit the new hardware. This was not so bad for early computer systems that were designed for just one or two purposes, but with the growing complexity of programs, it became necessary that programs be scalable and runnable on all comptuters, without having to bother about changing hardware.
The Operating System (OS) acts as a median between applications and hardware, with the help of which programmers don’t need to know the nitty-gritty of the hardware they write codes for. Their programs just need to talk to the OS, which in turn talks to the hardware. To achieve this, the OS provides programmers with an Application Program Interface (API), which lets them write programs that can communicate with the OS.
Your computer has many resources that help applications achieve their purpose. The most important, of course, is the CPU. There is also memory, hard drives, network connections, and several other pieces of hardware. The most important function of an OS is to manage all these resources and make sure that each application gets its fair share of all the resources it needs—they should get enough of the CPU’s time to get their instructions processed, enough memory to store their data in, and should be able to talk to any piece of hardware it wants to.
Finally, the OS talks to the world—it provides a user interface, which lets users give instructions to the OS or run applications of their choice. Earlier, OS’s used the command line interface, where users would type in what they wanted the OS to do. Today’s OS’s give us a Graphical User Interface (GUI). We use the mouse to point to and click on the pretty icons and they magically start our programs. While the things they do remain the same all over, different operating systems do things differently, depending on what they are designed for.
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