| operating system
A computer by itself is essentially
dumb bits of wire and silicon. An operating system knows how to talk to
this hardware and can manage a computer's functions, such as allocating
memory, scheduling tasks, accessing disk drives, and supplying a user
interface. Without an operating system, software developers would have to
write programs that directly accessed hardware--essentially reinventing
the wheel with every new program. With an operating system, such as
Windows NT or Mac OS 8, developers can write to a common set of
programming interfaces called APIs and let the operating system do the
dirty work of talking to the hardware. |