DEMO: Operating Systems

You might be aware that your computer has an operating system on it. Did you know that your notebook does? How about your phone? How about your watch? Even these TVs back here have an operating system that's running on it.

What an Operating System Does

An operating system, also known as an OS, provides a lot of different instruction for our computer and how it's going to operate. It's one of the first things that boots into our computer and gets it up and running. It's the thing that provides the environment that we're going to interact with, even so much so that most of your applications actually access the hardware through the operating system and don't access the hardware directly.

It's one of the things that creates consistency amongst all of our different applications, so when you're interacting with those applications it's not all different, there's a lot of similarities between these applications.

A lot of our calculators may not have any software at all. That is, we punch in a number into here, which then maybe gets translated into a binary number using a chip, and then there's another chip perhaps that does the processing and does the addition, and then there's a chip that then presents the information back into a decimal format so we can read it on the LCD screen. Or maybe these chips, more likely these chips, are all combined into one chip. But there's no software, it's all hardware coded into there.

However, microprocessors nowadays, and even some calculators, have much more complex processing that takes place, something that's going to need to have just an initial set of instructions to get up and running. Well, that's where the operating system comes into play.

Think about this. When you were born, you were born with a brain that could process information, but it wasn't trained yet. It didn't have any instructions to work off of. So you slowly interact with your surroundings and start learning how to walk, how to talk. You start learning the different ways that you can operate your body. Well, that's the instructions that get programmed on top of your brain, and your brain is just that processor. Well, a chip is just a processor, and it needs some instructions on how to operate. That's what the operating system is. It sets that initial set of instructions on how it's going to operate.

Consistency Across Programs

You might already be familiar with the Windows operating system, but I'm going to point out a couple things here. I'm going to open up the Windows menu and type in, and do the same thing for WordPad. These are two different programs, two different applications, that can help us do some sort of Word document, or document some sort of whatever it is that we want to document here.

If I go to file here, we can see that this menu looks very different than this menu over here. But if I go into the save as, even though these programs are different programs and they look very different, when I go into the save as, these windows are very similar. These two windows show us that this is part of the operating system at work here. It shows us some consistency even amongst these different programs.

If this wasn't part of the operating system, what would have to happen is, number one, you'd have each of these programs, whoever created the program would have to reinvent or recode this save as window right here. So it wouldn't be really efficient from that standpoint. But it also would make it so that each one of these interfaces would look different, and that could get really confusing.

Another thing that we can count on too is that there's simple navigation of these windows. Like closing out the windows or maximizing the windows is all similar amongst these programs as well. So we can really interact with these programs the same because of the operating system.

Finding Your OS Information

There's another thing that I wanted to show you, and that is how to get into, if you pull up a window here and say about your PC and open that up, you can find some data about your operating system. Here we see the top part here is more about the hardware, so it shows me the processor and what kind of processor I have in here, how much RAM I have installed here. But it also gives me some specifics around this operating system. So this is a Windows 10 Pro machine, and it gives me the version that it is and tells me some information about this machine.

Operating Systems and Firmware

I did want to talk about something that's very similar to operating systems, and that's firmware. An operating system really can be placed on a lot of different types of machines. So Windows 11 could be installed on a lot of types of machines out there, a lot of different vendors, and so it is a true operating system.

Firmware, however, is more purpose specific. It's designed for a specific use on specific hardware, and so firmware is much lighter, much smaller, than a whole operating system.

Now there are some lines that get a little blurry between firmware and operating system. For instance, these TVs back here is on something called Fire OS, which Fire OS could be installed on many different TV sets. But there is at some point in time where it gets more and more purpose driven. At what point in time does it become firmware? The lines could get a little blurry in that case.

But whether it's an operating system or firmware, they serve a very similar purpose: to give instructions to the hardware so the hardware knows how to operate and how to function, as well as the user interaction, so there's consistency amongst all the apps.