Operating Systems

The basic level of software with which you will work on your computer is the operating system. It's what you see when you don't have an application or utility program running. But an operating system is much more than what you see on the screen.

As the name implies, the operating system tells your computer how to operate, how to carry on its most basic functions. Early operating systems were designed simply to control how you read from and wrote to files on disks and were hence termed disk operating systems (which is why the original computer operating system was called DOS). Today's operating systems add a wealth of functions for controlling every possible computer peripheral from keyboard (and mouse) to monitor screen.

The ...

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