Introduction to Operating System
An operating system is a very important category of a computer system. A computer system should be defined as a collection of the hardware and software components. Hardware elements are those components that you can be felt physically, such as the CPU (Central Processing Unit), keyboard, memory, hard disk, printer, and many more. The software elements are group of instructions, also it referred to as programs, to the hardware (CPU) to perform various operations to bring out specific results such as prepare a letter, send electronic mail and etc. The most important software component of a computer system is the OS (Operating System).
The Operating system is a supervisor program which takes care of coordinating the operations of the machine from the time OS is switched on till it is switched off. Whenever the computer is turned on, the OS takes care of all the beginning functions which must occur to get the computer to a usable state. Several pieces of hardware are initialized.
The operating system associate with the complexity of manipulating the underlying hardware and permitting logical resource to accomplish the process or task
The major activities of an operating system are:
Running a Program
When a filename is entered on the terminal at the command line and the operating system interprets command; it loads the program into computer's memory and executes the program. Whenever more than one program/process runs concurrently on the system then the operating system takes care of scheduling the CPU for several processes and managing the computer's memory or other associated tasks.
Controlling the Input and Output Operations of the Computer
When any file related operations are carried out such as deleting a file from the hard disk or saving a file on to the disk, the operating system ensures in which the operation is carried out properly without erasing a various file or overwriting an existing file and many more. Likewise, it f displays the output on the terminal and accepts input from devices such as keyboard or mouse and prints the documents which are specified on the printer connected to the system.
Whenever the computer is shutdown, the operating system ensures in which the hardware is shutdown correctly. Without an operating system no other application could run.