What is Operating System
In this article I’m going to clarify common but frequently confused computer terminology: “operating system”, or “OS”.
If you find yourself with questions and wonder what is operating system, if so, you’re not the only one.
This is actually a fairly easy concept to make sense of when you have it explained the right way, as you’ll discover by the time you’re done reading this computer dictionary article.
Let me begin by mentioning first that an OS or operating system is a type of software.
To recap my explanation from a previous article, here’s how you can think of software:
“Software” is all of the parts of the computer that you really can’t observe or touch directly. Software would include things like a word processor, a Web browser, Windows or the Mac OS, plus all of your own files like letters, pictures, songs, and so on.
Here’s how you can 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.
Make sense? So let’s look at the OS specifically.
First off, 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 a couple different versions of the Windows operating system. While Mac OS 10.4 (often called “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (also known as “Leopard”) are two examples of versions of Mac OS X.
Alright, so what is an OS?
Think about it like this: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, and so on, and they also have the instinct to observe and soak up what’s going on around them.
as the years go by, a young person learns to talk and walk by observing the people around them, and as they grow up, they also learn more fundamental skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, etc.
So basically, they gradually transition from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the basic skills a person needs to go on to more specific skills such as learning to drive, playing a sport like soccer, writing a paper for a class, getting a job — you get the idea.
In a lot of ways, when you power up your computer, it’s kind of like a newborn baby, only having a few basic “instincts.”
It has the ability to power on, and display a picture on the screen, but not a lot more.
The only other thing the computer can do is look at the hard drive, and if it finds an operating system there, the computer knows to start running the OS.
That process is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and before you can actually start using it.
So, it’s just like when a child is born and grows up: the operating system contains the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills equivalent to walking, talking, reading, writing, etc., that lets everything else take place.
So in a sense, it’slike your computer is “born” and “grows up” in the space of 30 seconds to a minute or so (sometimes longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the OS.
So in other words, the OS is much like those fundamental skills we all have and learned as kids. More precisely, it’s the software on a computer that creates its desktop, its icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen when you move your mouse around,lets you work with files, lets you type, etc..
Without it, you couldn’t do anything with the PC but turn it on and see an error message like “non system disk or disk error” on a Windows PC, or a flashing question mark on a Mac.
So even though most people don’t fully understand what an OS is, or what it’s for, no-one could use a computer without it.
Now you understand what an OS is for and what it does.