Chapter 4. How an Operating System Controls Hardware
OPERATING systems were originally developed to handle one of the most complex input/output operations: communicating with a variety of disk drives. This is evidenced by the names given to early operating systems, which often contained the acronym DOS, for disk operating system. Eventually, the operating system quickly evolved into an all-encompassing bridge between your PC and the software you run on it.
Without an operating system, such as Windows, each programmer would have to invent from scratch the way a program displays text or graphics onscreen, how it sends data to the printer, how it reads ...
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