Operating System Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Operating System - Essay Example It should be noted that computers cannot function and will become useless without it. The operating systems in our modern times function in order to accomplish three major goals which include hiding the details of the hardware through the establishment of abstraction, to assign the resources to specific processes, and to provide the user with an interface which is simple and easy to use for his benefits (Muhammad 2). Because of their design and task in computing devices, OS have been named as resource manager where the primary resource is the computer hardware including processors, storage, input/output devices, communication devices and data. As a resource manager, the operating system generally functions by "implementing the user interface, sharing hardware among users, allowing users to share data among themselves, preventing users from interfering with one another, scheduling resources among users, facilitating input/output, recovering from errors, accounting for resource usage, facilitating parallel operations, organizing data for secure and rapid access, and handling network communications" (Muhammad 4). One of the main purposes of an operating system is to allow its user to run his preferred... The rapid technological advancement which allows the evolution of OS also enabled the creation of different types of operating systems. It should be noted that a single operating system like Windows 2000 falls into many categories as experts are able to lump the characteristics and features of these OS into one comprehensive type. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a huge development to the rather plain text boards that are features of early computers. The GUI is an OS which contains graphics allowing users to interact with computing devices usually through a mouse by the graphical icons and visual indicators. On the other hand, the multiple-user OS allows the use of computers by two or more individuals at the same time or different times. Individuals sharing the same computer benefits from this by keeping their privacy through their different accounts. Thus, their documents are hidden and are kept from each other. Multitasking OS denotes those which are capable of running two or more different software at the same time on the same machine. For example, Windows 2000 can run Internet Explorer and open Microsoft Word at the same also allowing the user to do multiple tasks in the computing device. Lastly, multithreading allows are those which allow different parts of individual or more software to run concurrently while multiprocessing is an OS which allows two or more computer processor. Works Cited Muhammad, Rashid. Operating System. N.d. 10 September 2008 Operating System. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2008. 10 September 2008