Operating Systems

            Operating systems are the referred to as intermediates between the hardware of a computer and the user. The operating system is one of the main components of a computer system, which consists of one or multiple software that manage the hardware components and software resources of a computer. The OS is controls the allocation of resources and services like memory, processors, external devices like mouse and keyboard, and information. Without an Operating System, a computer would be just pieces of materials that together that would serve no purpose. 

            Computer applications or programs are used by the user to complete several tasks as needed by the user. The user interacts with the computer through peripheral devices such as a mouse, keyboard, one or multiple screens. These interactions that seem easy, just clicking the mouse, typing on the keyboard, or dragging and dropping, are in fact complicated tasks, requiring the computer software to interact with the computer hardware, accessing different parts of the memory location and CPU. This is all made possible by Operating System, which is the regulator, controls all processes happening at a given time. Operating System main feature known as portability, is the reason applications and programs run unchanged and with the same script code in different kinds of computers. 

            Operating System is also responsible for the file management in a computer. The user communicates through the OS, and gives directions on how to organize certain files and folders as he wishes. Files on a computer are a collection of different kinds of data, like pictures, music, word processing, spreadsheets etc. The OS categorizes these files differently in a way that is visible and easy recognizable for the user. The way OS does that is by attaching an extension at the end of the file type, like a suffix or a ‘last name’ on the file. Most of the Operating Systems nowadays are graphical Operating Systems, making it possible for the user to have visibility of all the files, folders and applications on a computer. OS has search features like Finder on MacOS or Windows Explorer on  Windows, for easier access to files, folders and applications. 

            The Operating System is the main platform on a computer, and it’s the reason why as users we are able to multitask and run several programs at the same time. The operating system loads the instructions of the program in CPU, assigns memory locations to files and applications in the RAM from the Hard Disk, and keeps that order in the most efficient way possible, so that when we’re running multiple programs at the same time, it seems as they’re running simultaneously but in fact they’re not. The OS switches back and forth thousands of times per second, running bits of the multiple applications the user has actively open at a time. 

            Operating systems like any other software is made of written code. C is the most common programming language that is used to write Operating Systems. That is for a number of factors, but most importantly being that C is the closest to assembly language that the machine understands, and having 1-1 translation to machine code makes C easily understandable by the machine code. C has no built in complicated data structures like trees or hash tables. C was originally designed for system level and embedded software development. 

            Operating Systems is a topic that touches every fundamental part of information technology, used by every computer, manipulating directly software and hardware. It is in itself a super software, which concludes in lots of instructions given to the computer hardware and other software and mediates everything that is happening inside a computer at a given time.