What Does OS Mean
Computers July 3rd, 2009
In this article I’m going to help you finally make sense of what for most people is one of the most confusing and least understood computer terms around: “operating system”, or “OS”.
Maybe you’ve found yourself with questions and wonder what operating system means, if so, you’re not the only one.
This actually can be a pretty easy idea to get when it’s explained the right way to you, as you’ll discover by the time you finish reading this computer dictionary article.
First, 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 aren’t able to observe or handle directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Excel, your email program, Windows or the Mac OS, plus all of your personal files like individual emails, pictures, MP3s, and more.
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.
Are you getting the idea now? So let’s talk about the operating system specifically.
First off, let me give a couple of examples: the two best known operating systems right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).
Windows Vista and Windows XP are two versions of Microsoft Windows. While Mac OS 10.4 (a.k.a “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (also called “Leopard”) are a couple different versions of Mac OS X.
OK, so what is an OS?
Just think about it like this: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, and so on, and also the instinct to observe and soak up everything going on around them.
as the years go by, a young child learns to talk and walk by observing others, and as they mature, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, and so on.
So basically, they go 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 football, writing a paper for a class, getting a job,etc.
In many ways, when you power up your computer, it’s kind of like a newborn baby, only having a couple of basic “instincts.”
The computer is able to turn on, and show a picture on the display, but not a lot more.
The only other thing the computer can do is check the hard drive, and if it finds an OS there, it knows to load the info into memory for use.
This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and when you’re able to actually start using it.
So in other words, it’s just like when a child is born and grows up: the operating system has the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills equivalent to walking, talking, reading, writing, and so on, that allow everything else to hapen.
So it’s kind ofas if your computer is “born” and “grows up” in the space of 30 to 60 seconds or so (sometimes longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the operating system.
So in other words, the OS is much like those basic skills we all have and learned when we were young. 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 as you move your mouse around,lets you view files and open them, lets you type, etc..
Without the operating system, you couldn’t do anything with your computer but turn it on and see useless information like “non system disk or disk error” on a Microsoft Windows computer, or a flashing question mark on a Mac.
So even though many computer users don’t really understand what an OS is, or what it does, none of us could use a PC without having one.
Now you understand what an OS is for and what it does.
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