An operating system is the software layer that controls a computer's hardware and provides a consistent environment for applications to run. This topic covers what an OS is, how it evolved, and the core role it plays in shaping the user experience.
Operating Systems
Your experience when you're using your computer really varies widely based off of the operating system that you're using.
When we have a device that computes, it can look very simple. For instance, like a calculator: you have a number pad, it gets entered in and processed using an integrated circuit, and then it will display it somehow in the way that we can interpret that. There is no software involved in some really basic computers. But as our computing devices became more complex and we started using things like microprocessors, we had to have something that would actually do the control. We had to have software that would control these microprocessors, and that's what an operating system is. It's just software that's running on the computer.
This software is made up of a lot of different programs. We've got some small little programs that are running and large programs that are running; it's really just a bunch of programs that are running the computer. Some of those programs are system softwares designed to run that computer, and maybe they need drivers so they can run certain aspects like the hardware of that computer. Or maybe it's a utility; there's a lot of utilities that help us manage that computer. Or applications software that we use to actually carry out some sort of function. Really, all that software works together to provide us some sort of user experience, or UX as it's abbreviated, so it really allows us to interact with that computer.
One of the earlier versions of computers, we would use punch cards to interact with the computer. We would punch out our codes on this punch card and then we would feed it into the computer, and that's how we gave that computer instructions. At some point in time we started developing front ends, so we could feed in commands instead of the actual punch cards into the machine, and we'd enter in these commands and then it would give us some sort of output. Eventually we replaced those text user inputs with some sort of graphical interface instead. And in the end our experience using the computer continues to improve. We continue to develop it, we add more features to it, we add some ways that it really looks and feels a little more polished, and so our user experience continues to get better and better with these computers.
One of the things that an operating system gives us is a similar look and feel when we're using different applications, so we don't have to relearn how to do things every time we use a different application. I wanted to show you an example of how we have very different programs here, yet there's a lot of similarities between these programs.
What we have here on the left is WordPad. It comes on your computer and you can do some basic word processing on it. On the right here is KeePass. This is a password manager, and something that is available for free, and it's the password manager that I use, although this is just my demo database right here. So here's KeePass versus WordPad.
Now what we see here is that the windows look very similar in many ways. That is, in the top right we have this X if I wanted to close out of it; next one over I've got my maximize or resize button; I've got my minimize button here. And so these windows look the same. On the right side here, this KeePass, I can grab the top title bar and move it around; same thing with WordPad, I can move it around. If I wanted to size them, I go to the bottom right hand corner to size them. If I go to file, I can go file and then click save as, and file and save as, and we see here that these two windows are pretty much the same. There's a couple little differences here, but for the most part it's laid out all the same. And that's because these applications don't have to reinvent the wheel; it's making a similar look and feel to all of this, and that's because it's all integrated into this operating system. So that's one of the advantages that an operating system gives us.
An operating system carries out quite a few different functions.
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