what is opperating system and why is it required?

Question

operating system

Answer 1

With the help of operating system computer is able to communicate with outer world or user & vice versa.Operating system also handles the hardware.

Answer 2

Operating System (OS) is the means by which all computer hardware functions are being presented to you on a monitor. You cannot operate a computer without an operating system...

Answer 3

In simple words; An Operation System is a program that talks to the various hardware devices and as well as understands users requests and expains it to the hardware devices about what to do.

In this way the user talks to the system and the hardware responds to the user.

Cheers!

Answer 4

an operating system is what your computer uses to make all the things it can do work. windows is an operating system, as is mac OS * (whatever version)
its like a platform that all your programs and things like that use to run off of. it stores info about your devices, (like sound a video cards and your harddrive) so you can use them too.

Answer 5

Without an Operating System (also known as OS for short) you'd have nothing to boot your harddrive up with and no programs to run it on...it's a platform for your computing software needs.

Answer 6

An analogy for it could be : Operating system is that track (software) on which you run various other trains (software packages) and thus bring life to the hardware.

Answer 7

Read this Wiki Page on Operating System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

Answer 8

Okay on reading your question I can clearly see that you have no knowledge whatsoever about computers (no pun intended)
An operating system is what your machine runs so that you can interact with it.

Answer 9

An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. At the foundation of all system software, the OS performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking, and managing files. It also may provide a graphical user interface for higher level functions.

History

Main article: History of operating systems

The first computers did not have operating systems. By the early 1960s, commercial computer vendors were supplying quite extensive tools for streamlining the development, scheduling, and execution of jobs on batch processing systems. Examples were produced by UNIVAC and Control Data Corporation, amongst others.

Through the 1960s, several major concepts were developed, driving the development of operating systems. The development of the IBM System/360 produced a family of mainframe computers available in widely differing capacities and price points, for which a single operating system OS/360 was planned (rather than developing ad-hoc programs for every individual model). This concept of a single OS spanning an entire product line was crucial for the success of System/360 and, in fact, IBM's current mainframe operating systems are distant descendants of this original system; applications written for the OS/360 can still be run on modern machines. OS/360 also contained another important advance: the development of the hard disk permanent storage device (which IBM called DASD). Another key development was the concept of time-sharing: the idea of sharing the resources of expensive computers amongst multiple computer users interacting in real time with the system. Time sharing allowed all of the users to have the illusion of having exclusive access to the machine; the Multics timesharing system was the most famous of a number of new operating systems developed to take advantage of the concept.

Multics, particularly, was an inspiration to a number of operating systems developed in the 1970s, notably Unix by Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson. Another commercially-popular minicomputer operating system was VMS.

The first microcomputers did not have the capacity or need for the elaborate operating systems that had been developed for mainframes and minis; minimalistic operating systems were developed, often loaded from ROM and known as Monitors. One notable early disk-based operating system was CP/M, which was supported on many early microcomputers and was largely cloned in creating MS-DOS, which became wildly popular as the operating system chosen for the IBM PC (IBM's version of it was called IBM-DOS or PC-DOS), its successors making Microsoft one of the world's most profitable companies. The major alternative throughout the 1980s in the microcomputer market was Mac OS, tied intimately to the Apple Macintosh computer.

By the 1990s, the microcomputer had evolved to the point where, as well as extensive GUI facilities, the robustness and flexibility of operating systems of larger computers became increasingly desirable. Microsoft's response to this change was the development of Windows NT, which served as the basis for Microsoft's entire operating system line starting in 1999. Apple rebuilt their operating system on top of a Unix core as Mac OS X, released in 2001. Hobbyist-developed reimplementations of Unix, assembled with the tools from the GNU Project, also became popular; versions based on the Linux kernel are by far the most popular, with the BSD derived UNIXes holding a small portion of the server market.

The growing complexity of embedded devices has led to increasing use of embedded operating systems.

[edit] Today
Mac OS X in action
Mac OS X in action

Modern operating systems usually have a Graphical user interface (GUI) which uses a pointing device such as a mouse or stylus for input in addition to the keyboard. Older models and Operating Systems not designed for direct-human interaction (such as web-servers) generally use a Command line interface (or CLI) typically with only the keyboard for input. Both models are centered around a "shell" which accepts and processes commands from the user (eg. clicking on a button, or a typed command at a prompt). The choice of OS may depend on the hardware architecture, specifically the CPU, with only Linux and BSD running on almost any CPU. Windows NT, which is no longer supported, was ported to the DEC Alpha and MIPS Magnum. Since the early 1990s, the choice for personal computers has largely been limited to the Microsoft Windows family, the Unix-like family and Linux, of which Linux and Mac OS X are becoming the major alternatives. Mainframe computers and embedded systems use a variety of different operating systems, many with no direct connection to Windows or Unix.

Answer 10

interface between human and system hardware.
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APPLICATION PROGRAMS
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OPERATING SYSTEMS
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HARDWARE
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