Operating System

Operating Systems

Operating systems have been one of the prime functions of computers in our day to day lives. Everything we do on computers and some devices is done and runs through some type of operating system. From your notebooks and touch pads to your smartphones and even gaming system uses some type of operating system.

We begin this essay by starting off with the history of operating systems. In the early days computers did not have any form of operating systems. The user had sole use of the particular machine using punched paper tape for his program of data. The program would load into the machine while the machine is set to work until the program stopped or crash. These programs could be debugged from the front panel using switches and light . Later machines came with libraries of support code that linked the user program to assist in operations like input and output. Becoming the genesis of today's modern day operating system at the same time still having machines that only ran a single job at one time ("History of Computer").

When machines became more powerful the time needed for a run of a program diminished and the time to hand off the equipment became very large. Accounting for machine usage went from watching the time to the computer doing the timing for you. The run queues began to use magnetic tape drives instead of punch cards on the previous cards ("History of Computer")..

Early operating systems were diverse because each vendor produced one or more operating systems specific to their particular hardware. Every operating system could have radically different models of commands, operating procedures, and debugging aids. So every time a company introduced a new machine it would also come with a new operating system. This continued to go on until the 1960s when IBM developed the System/360s series of machines that would use the same instruction architecture("History of Computer").

In 1985 Windows 1.0 was released. Windows 1.0...