In this article I’m going to clarify common but frequently confused computer terminology: “operating system”, or “OS”.
If you find yourself with questions and wonder what is the operating system, if so, you’re not the only one.
This actually is a fairly simple concept to get when you have it explained the right way, as you’ll find by the time you’re done reading this computer dictionary article.
Now an operating system, or OS, is a type of software.
If you aren’t sure what I mean by software, let me explain:
“Software” is all of the parts of the computer that you really aren’t able to observe or handle directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Word, an email program like Outlook, Windows or the Mac OS, plus all of your personal files like letters, pictures, MP3s, etc.
Here’s how you can think about it: hardware is like your brain, a physical part of your body, while software is like your mind or your thoughts — the non-physical part of yourself.
Software runs on hardware, just like your thoughts “run on” your brain.
Does that make sense? So let’s look at the operating system specifically.
So, let me give a couple of examples: the two best known OS right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).
Windows XP and Windows Vista are two versions of Windows. While Mac OS 10.4 (also known as “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (also called “Leopard”) are two examples of versions of Mac OS X.
OK, so what is an OS?
Think about it like this: when a person is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, etc., and also the instinct to watch, listen and soak up everything going on around them.
as the years go by, a young child learns to talk and walk by watching the people around them, and as they mature, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, etc.
Another way to say this is, they go from being able to do not a lot except eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the general skills a person needs to learn more specific skills such as learning to drive, playing a sport like basketball, writing a paper for a class, working a job — you get the idea.
In many ways, when you turn a computer on, it’s kind of like a newborn baby, only having a couple of fundamental “instincts.”
It can power on, and show an image on the monitor, but that’s about it.
The only other thing it can do is look at the hard drive, and if it finds the files it needs there, the computer can start up.
This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and when you’re able to actually start using it.
So, it’s just like when a child is born and grows up: the operating system contains the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills equivalent to walking, talking, reading, writing, and so on, that allow everything else to hapen.
So in a sense, it’sas if your computer is “born” and “grows up” in the space of thirty to sixty seconds or so (or longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the operating system.
In other words, the OS is much like those fundamental skills we all have and learned as children. More specifically, it’s the software on the computer that displays the desktop, your icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen as you move your mouse around,allows you to view and open files, lets you type, and so on.
Without the operating system, you couldn’t do anything with your PC but turn it on and see an unhelpful message such as “non system disk or disk error” on a Microsoft Windows computer, or a flashing question mark on a Mac.
So even though lots of people don’t really understand what an OS is, or what it does, you couldn’t use your computer without one.
Make sense?