Operating Systems

What is an operating system?

There are more than a few.

What others are out there? (note: this page is dated, but it is a good historical comparison)

Evolution of Operating Systems (also somewhat dated, but also useful for the historical background)

How Operating Systems Work - to quote How Stuff Works,

At the simplest level, an operating system does two things:  from How Stuff Works, a model of the layers of software incorporated in the operating system

  1. It manages the hardware and software resources of the computer system. These resources include such things as the processor, memory, disk space, etc.
  2. It provides a stable, consistent way for applications to deal with the hardware without having to know all the details of the hardware.


Operating systems can be either clients or servers

clients and/or servers:

Windows
Mac
Linux

usually seen as a server OS:

UNIX - Note where we had to go to find this page

So, let's look at UNIX

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