What Does OS Mean
Written by man on July 4th, 2009 in Other.
In this article I’m going to clarify common but frequently confused computer terminology: “operating system”, or “OS”.
Maybe you’ve found yourself with questions and wonder what OS means,, if so, you’re not alone in wondering about this.
This actually is a fairly easy concept to get when it’s explained the right way to you, as you’ll discover by the time you finish reading this computer dictionary article.
Now an operating system, or OS, is a type of software.
To recap my explanation from a previous article, here’s how you can think of software:
“Software” would be all of the pieces of the computer that you really aren’t able to see or touch directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer, Windows or the Mac OS, and all of your own files like letters, photos, music, and so on.
Here’s another way to 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.
Are you getting the idea now? So let’s get to the operating system specifically.
So, let me give a couple of examples: the two best known operating systems right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).
Windows Vista and Windows XP are two versions of Microsoft Windows. While Mac OS 10.4 (also called “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (a.k.a “Leopard”) are two different versions of Mac OS X.
Alright then so what is an OS?
Here’s how to think about it: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, etc., and they also have the instinct to watch, listen, and absorb everything going on around them.
as the years go by, a young person learns to talk and walk by observing others, and as they mature, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, etc.
So basically, they go from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the basic skills a person needs to learn more specialized skills like learning to drive, playing a sport like football, writing a paper for a class, working a job — you get the idea.
In many ways, when you boot up your PC, it’s just like a newborn baby, only having a couple of fundamental “instincts.”
The computer is able to turn on, and show a picture on the screen, but that’s about it.
The only other thing the computer can do is look at the hard drive, and if it finds an OS there, it can start running the OS.
This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and before you can actually start using it.
So in other words, it’s just like when a child is born and grows up: the OS has the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills like walking, talking, reading, writing, etc., that make everything else possible.
So it’s kind ofas if your computer is “born” and “grows up” in the space of 30 seconds to a minute or so (or longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the operating system.
In other words, the OS is similar to those underlying skills we all have and learned when we grew up. More specifically, it’s the software on a computer that displays its desktop, its icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen when you move your mouse around,allows you to view files and open them, lets you type, etc..
Without the OS, you couldn’t do anything with your computer but turn it on and see an error message such as “non system disk or disk error” on a Windows-type computer, or a flashing question mark on one of Apple’s Macintosh PCs.
So even though most people don’t fully understand what an OS is, or what it does, you couldn’t use your computer without having one.
Now you understand what an OS is for and what it does.
