At the highest level, the operating system (OS) is a piece of software that is there to manage all of the software and hardware of the computer. It is not generally considered to be a single program, but a series of programs and utilities that can make this happen.
Most of the time, in a modern computer system, there are different computer programs running simultaneously. They all need to access the computer’s central processing unit (CPU), memory, storage, and other hardware components. The operating system coordinates all of this to make sure each program gets what it needs.
How it does this is through a process of scheduling and abstraction.
Scheduling
The scheduling is how your computer looks to see what needs to run, and then allocates the resources for that application to run. We’ll look at that topic in a lot more detail in a few weeks.
Abstraction
Abstraction is a bigger deal. Ever heard of the term “driver”…well your OS is designed to interact with drivers. Hardware manufactures write drives based upon how they will work but meet a set of standards so the OS can work with that driver.
When an application goes to write to the long term storage, it doesn’t need to know if that is a hard disk (HD), or a Solid State Drive (SSD), or thumb drive, or a SD Card. It knows there is a drive, and it makes a write call… that write call is then pushed to the drive, which makes the commands to the hardware to work.
This way, you don’t have to worry about how to move the read/write head, or how big the cluster is on the drive. You don’t have to worry about drive cache or any of those other hardware related tasks, you only have to make the appropriate system call.
You do lose a little bit of performance, but it is negligible and for the simplicity of call, it is a worth while trade off.
This is true for working with any hardware device, whether it is a mouse or other input device, or an output device like your computer monitor, network card, etc.
By abstracting the process, it makes it easy for the developer, and transparent for the end user.
The Purpose of the Operating System was originally found on Access 2 Learn
