Monologue on Operating Systems

Monologue on Operating Systems

Have you ever thought about how a computer understands your commands and runs it, even though we and the computer speak different languages? It doesn’t speak English or Russian: it speaks in ones and zeros. You can’t communicate directly with your computer but that’s where your operating system comes in. So, let's talk more about it.

The operating system, or OS, is the program that lets you interact with your computer. It enables the computer hardware to communicate and operate with the computer software. Therefore, together the operating system and computer hardware form a complete system that determines what your computer can do.

Many different operating systems have been created over the history of the computer. Let's talk about the most popular types. To begin with, modern OS use a graphical user interface, or GUI. The graphical interface uses a combination of graphics and text, so the user sees various icons, buttons and menus on the screen and can click on them. In the second place, multi-user operating system. This type allows for multiple users to use the same computer at the same time and at different times. The third type is quite wide. It includes other systems with the prefix multi: multiprocessing, multitasking, multithreading. Thus, the range of possibilities of this type of OS is large. It supports and utilizes more than one computer processor, allows multiple software processes to run at the same time and allows different parts of a software program to run concurrently. Moreover, there are mobile operating systems. They are designed to power smartphones, tablets, and wearables devices.

Earlier we talked about the operating system controlling all the software on the hard drive and hardware in a computer. But how important and necessary is it? An OS acts as an intermediary between the user and different applications: it creates an environment in which the user can work with these programs. This means that the operating system must control and provide the computer’s resources in a usable format and ensure that the computer system is comfortable to use.

The main function of the OS is clear, but what other tasks does it have? For example, process, memory, file and device management. In other words, computer system has multiple applications and processes running, so the OS looks after a variety of things. Firstly, it ensures that each process has enough memory to execute. Secondary, it balances the needs of each process with the different types of memory available. Thirdly, it allocates enough of the processor’s time to each process and application. In addition, the OS should run properly, allocate resources efficiently and it should be adaptable towards different uses.

If we talk about OS, we need to know its history. Operating systems were developed in the 1950s. The first OS could run one job at a time and its main function was to automatically execute a new program when the old one had finished. The ability to switch from job to job as needed and to keep several jobs advancing while keeping the peripheral devices in use were created in 1972. Later, the concept of multiprogramming was developed, allowing to take better advantage of the computer's resources.