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Computer basic concepts - part six
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Computer Software - An Introduction...
Software is a vitally important component to the operation of a computer system. Without the appropriate software program instruction, the hardware devices in a computer system are rather useless.
For a computer system to function property, two distinct types of software programs are a necessity, system programs and application programs.
System Programs…
System programs communicate to the computer system when and how to use the appropriate resources. The operating system is a software package that builds a “bridge of communication” between hardware and application programs.
An operating system provides the tools necessary end-user programs to translate their commands into a form understood by the computer's hardware. The operating system's "cushion" layer of control between the hardware and software programs is a required entity to the practical functions of computing: creating new files, editing existing files, deleting files, and printing.
Although there are a number of operating systems available, the Single-user, multi-tasking type of operating system is the system that most people use on their desktop and laptop computers today. The most common are the Windows family of operating systems developed by Microsoft, the Macintosh operating systems developed by Apple and the UNIX family of operating systems developed by a whole history of individuals, corporations and collaborators.
While each of these operating systems appear to be quite different due primarily to the variety of interfaces … the system’s visual appearance on the computer’s monitor .. among these products, each operating system performs many of the same basic functions. At the most basic level, an operating system performs two tasks:
- In a desktop or laptop computer system, the operating system manages the hardware and software resources such as the processor, memory, disk space and more. This first task of managing the resources is very important. Various programs and input methods vie for all the attention of the central processing unit (CPU) and demand memory, storage and input/output (I/O) bandwidth for their own successful operations.
Based on this premise, the operating system allocates the adequate resources necessary to each application while effectively monitoring the remaining available system resources for the end-users and applications.
- The operating system provides a stable, consistent way for applications to handle the system hardware without knowing all the details of the hardware.
A consistent application program interface (API) allows a software developer to write an application on one computer and have a high level of confidence that it will run on another computer of the same type, even if the amount of memory or the quantity of storage is different on the two machines.
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