What is an operating system?

An operating system, or OS, is software that interacts with hardware on a computer

while also providing a standardized interface for applications to perform tasks.
This critical layer of computing allows for an application
to perform tasks such as getting data from the network, or accessing files while
the operating system handles details like how to manage traffic to or from the
specific model of network card, or how to handle writing or retrieving data from
the specific type of storage devices included in the computer.

The operating system sits between applications and hardware and makes the
connections between software and the physical resources that do the work.

Examples of operating systems include Mac OS, Windows, and a variety of types of
Linux.

Examples of hardware include not only disk drives and network adapters, but also
items such as keyboards, mice, memory and displays.

Consider a user who opens a web browser and views something on the internet. That
simple task uses the computer's graphics card
and display so the user can view the content.

The computer's network interface was used to transmit and receive the content. The
computer's central processing unit, or CPU, was
used to organize the network data as well as to render that data into viewable
graphics and fonts, and perform formatting of the page. And there were many other
small things the web browser did to make that page viewable for the user. All of
these tasks and the system's resources used by the browser were coordinated, and
operated, by the operating system of the computer running the web
browser.

Without the operating system, the application developer would have to write code
for each of these low-level tasks to be performed by the application.

Thanks to the operating system, application developers have standard methods of

interacting with the system's resources and other programs running on the computer,
which means the developer who wrote that web browser did not have to provide
drivers for network cards,
instructions for CPU scheduling, graphics card drivers, their own networking stack,
and thousands of other things their application leveraged; they could focus on
developing their web browser software.

Continue to the next topic: What is Linux?