Operating Systems and UNIX
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Have you ever wondered why we have operating systems at all, or if there's anything out there that's better than Windows? Boy have you come to the right place! This article will explain the purpose of an OS on your computer, and then take a close look at UNIX, an operating system with a long and respected history.You can have the latest hardware technology and the most efficiently overclocked system, but what if you don't have software that can exploit it? Then again, if every application had to request the resources of your system on its own, a few greedy ones could take over and chaos would result. Therefore, we need some centralized software that will manage the resources for applications and assure that everything gets what they're supposed to. Not less and not more.
This centralized software is called the operating system. There are a few on the market, like Windows from Microsoft, the Linux distributions, Solaris from Sun or Mac OS X from Apple. Some are more popular than others, and they may accomplish tasks in different ways, however, in the end they all are built around the same concept.
An operating system manages resources and serves as a virtual machine at the same time. The resources can be of three types: hardware (CPU, memory, video card, and so forth), software (your applications/games obviously) and human (the user). It serves as a virtual machine because it simplifies the usage of the computer.
Certainly, you could build applications that would take over all of the resources sources I enumerated before, however it would be hard to use them, as there would not be a general guide that most of the time applies to it. For example, most users of Windows are familiar with the concept that you install software via a setup that features a wizard. This is a general concept; users do not have to learn a new installation method for each of its applications.
Operating systems can be classified in a couple of ways. First, from the point of view of the user, we can talk about batch, interactive and real time operating systems. Second, we can classify them by the number of processes that can run at the same time; there are single and multi-tasking systems. Also, we can consider how many users can use a particular operating system at the same time; there are single- and multi-user operating systems.
Finally, we can classify an OS based on the number of CPUs it can support; there are those that support one, two, and so forth. The goal for today will be to meet the UNIX operating system. First, we will take a look at how it came to life. We will follow this with a description of UNIX and a general description of how operating systems (and in particular UNIX) are built.
Next: History of UNIX >>
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