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Operating Systems Definition An operating system is basically the software that runs your machine of hardware Anatomy
An operating system is made up of four basic parts: 1-The KERNEL; the kernel is the heart of the operating system, it distributes specific jobs to its drivers, it doesn’t deal with any single piece of hardware, rather it controls the machine as a whole. 2-The DRIVERS; the drivers are the specific pieces of software that are associated with specific pieces of hardware, (e.g. the printer driver deals with the printer) drivers translate the users orders to a language that the machine can understand (zeros and ones). 3- The SHELL; the shell is the outside layer of the operating system, it is the user interface; it is used to input data and give orders to the operating system, without a shell, the operating system couldn’t do anything. 4- The APPLICATIONS; the applications are the programs that ask to use the computers resources, the operating system was designed to make these resources available to these applications. Hardware The basic pieces of hardware that the operating system deals with are: 1-The CPU (central processing unit); this is more known as the processor, it is the brain of the computer; it has the problem solving power that applications need; it distributes this power to the applications according to orders given to it from the operating system.
2- The DEVICES; the devices are the external hardware that the user uses to give orders to the operating system (e.g. the mouse, the keyboard, the microphone…).
3- The MEMORY; the memory is where the computer stores data while the computer is running; there are two kinds of memory, RAM (random access memory) which losses data upon restart, and ROM (read only memory) which never losses data unless it is destroyed
4- The STORAGE; the OS provides access to the data inside the hard disk through what is called a file-system; it is what provides the tree structure of files and folders.
Questions: 1- How do different operating systems communicate? 2- What is the best operating system? 3- How did it all start? 4- Why is Linux open source? 5- How can not being open source be profitable?
* For m ore inform ation? Go to these url’s: http://www.howstuffworks.com/operating-system.htm en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems Summarized and quoted from: http://www.iu.hio.no/~mark/os/os.html Mohammed I. Janahi End.
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