What’s OS – A Plain English Explanation
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”.
If you find yourself with questions and wonder what is operating system, if so, you’re not the only one to wonder this.
This really is a pretty simple concept to grasp when it’s explained the right way to you, as you’re going to discover by the time you finish reading this computer dictionary article.
Now an operating system, or OS, is a type of software.
If you aren’t sure what I mean by software, let me explain:
“Software” refers to all of the parts of the computer that you can’t really see or handle directly. Software would include things like a word processor, a Web browser, Windows or the Mac OS, as well as all of your own files like specific emails, photos, music, etc.
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 OS specifically.
First off, let me give a couple of examples: the two best known OS right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).
Windows XP and Windows Vista are two versions of Microsoft Windows. While Mac OS 10.4 (also called “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (also known as “Leopard”) are a couple different versions of Mac OS X.
Alright then so what is an OS?
Think of it this way: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, etc., and also the instinct to watch, listen, and absorb what’s going on around them.
as the years go by, a young person learns to talk and walk by watching the people around them, and as they grow up, they also learn more fundamental skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, etc.
So in other words, they gradually transition from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the common skills a person needs to go on to more specialized skills like driving, playing a sport like soccer, writing an essay for school, getting a job — you get the idea.
In a lot of ways, when you turn a computer on, it’s just like a newborn baby, only having one or two fundamental “instincts.”
The computer is able to power on, and display a picture on the screen, but that’s pretty much it.
The only other thing it can do is check the hard drive, and if it finds an OS there, it knows to start running the OS.
This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and when you can actually start using it.
So, 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 make everything else possible.
So it’s kind oflike your computer is “born” and “grows up” in the space of thirty to sixty seconds or so (sometimes longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the operating system.
So, the operating system is sort of like those basic skills we all have and learned as we grew up. More precisely, it’s the software on your computer that displays your desktop, your icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen when you move your mouse around,allows you to view and open files, lets you type, etc..
Without the OS, you couldn’t do anything with the computer but push the power button and see useless information like “non system disk or disk error” on a Windows-type computer, or a flashing question mark on a Mac.
So even though many computer users don’t fully understand what an OS is, or how it works, none of us could use a PC without it.
Now you finally get what an OS is for an what it does.
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