All About Operating Systems, Their Uses and Importance

An operating system can be considered as the base of any device that you can interact with. It may be your laptop/personal computer on which you are reading this or may be your personal phone, iPhone or any personal, commercial or home based device that you have and use it in your daily life. Now, let us know more about what it is and how it works.

It is basically a software component, which acts as an interface between the hardware device like the computer/laptop and you. The operating systems can be broadly classified into four types depending on the applications supported by them and the type of computer systems they control. They are: Real Time OS, Single User-Multi-tasking, Single-user-single task, and Multi-user.

This operating system component of your computer enables you to have a quick and easy interaction with the hardware. Since, the hardware cannot understand the English language there must be something to make it interactive and this is exactly what an OS does and that too very efficiently. It only understands the binary language, but at a faster rate. You will be able to do your entire personal or impersonal tasks with the help of the operating system. It is usually different for different types of hardware and they are as mentioned below:

Operating systems for mobile / handheld devices

As you know, an operating system is necessary for any device to run and the functionality of them depends upon the device for which they are developed by the group of developers. A mobile that works for all the mobile devices is called mobile OS (operating system). Various mobile hardware manufacturers have developed their own OS for their mobile phones.

Various corporations present a number of handheld devices for the users. All of them have their OS developed by themselves. Similarly, all other companies that offering their own handheld devices or mobile phones configure their devices in such a way that no other company's OS could work with them. Today, the mobile OS have become capable of computation equal to the personal computers.

Operating system for computers / laptops

Operating system is also developed and used differently with all types of the non-moving computing devices. They are developed basically in following the base platforms or in simple language can be understood as the categories. First one is under Linux platform and the second is UNIX and the third one is windows environment or windows platform. Linux has been developed by various freelancers and hence, it comes under open source and free software development and distribution scheme.

Windows OS is new and the first OS to support graphical user interface. It was initially launched in DOS (disk OS ) environment to work with commands only. It has also some versions to act as server called windows server. Nowadays, most of the things are on mobile environment that is why, the new windows operating system is developed to be compatible with both mobile as well as personal handheld devices.



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