Welcome to OS News

This web site will help to give you some insight into what a piece of software must do to be called an operating system, and show you how the operating system works to turn a collection of hardware into a powerful computing tool.

History

The earliest operating systems were developed in the late 1950s to manage tape storage, but programmers mostly wrote their own I/O routines. In the mid-1960s, operating systems became essential to manage disks, complex timesharing and multitasking systems.

Today, all multi-purpose computers from micro to mainframe use an operating system. Special-purpose devices (appliances, games, toys, etc.) generally do not. They usually employ a single program that performs all the required I/O and processing tasks.

Common Operating Systems

Every general-purpose computer must have an operating system to run other programs. Operating systems perform basic tasks, such as recognising from the keyboard, sending to the display screen, keeping track of files and directories on the disk and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers.

For large systems, the operating system has even greater responsibilities and powers. It is like a traffic cop; it makes sure that different programs and users running at the same time do not interfere with each other. The operating system is also responsible for security, ensuring that unauthorised users do not access the system.

All desktop computers have operating systems. The primary operating systems in use are the many versions Windows(95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP), the many versions of UNIX (Solaris, Linux, etc.), and the Macintosh O.S.s. There are also hundreds of other operating systems available for special-purpose applications, including specialisations for mainframes, robotics, manufacturing, real-time control systems and so on.