OPERATING SYSTEMS

What is an Operating System ?

If we speak in general terms, SOFTWARE is divided into 2 categories:

1. Application software
2. System software

Application Software

All the softwares which have specific functionality and which are little less complex than System Softwares, moreover they depend on System Softwares for their functioning and some of us use them in our daily lives, those are known as Application Softwares.

All the parts of above definition are very general and are written to make even a layman understand. 

e.g. of 

1) Softwares having specific functionalities are:

• Adobe photoshop(functions to work on pictures)
• MS Word (functions as a writing editor)
• Adobe Dreamweaver (functions as a website development tool)
• Oracle database 11g (functions as a database management tool)

2) Although they are also complex softwares, but as compared to System Softwares(windows 7,vista, 8, Machintosh), they are little less complex.

3)If windows is not installed on your laptop/desktop, then, Is it possible to run any of the above stated Application Softwares on your laptop/desktop. This implies Application Softwares are dependent on System Softwares for their working. They can't run on bare hardware.

System Software

Our laptop/Desktop consists of electronic parts, which we can see inside it's casing.We know that most of those electronic parts work on binary language (i.e. language of 0's and 1's ).

Operating system logos of various companies

Imagine if we've to directly work on hardware parts to get our work done, then we would have to remember large number of sequences of 0's and 1's, which is impossible. Therefore, we designed such softwares that deals with hardware behind the scenes and deals with us face to face, to get our work done.

So, the windows 7 , vista, xp, or 8 or machintosh( on apple laptops) which operates on hardware and interacts with us simultaneously , are called as System Softwares or OPERATING SYSTEMS.

NOTE : since the usage of WINDOWS is so much that, it has become synonymous to OPERATING SYSTEM.