Operating System

Introduction

The operating system, commonly known as OS, is the brain or the center of all computer systems. It controls the input/output and controls various tasks of the hardware. Apart from serving as a go-between for application programs and the hardware of the computer, the OS also consists of information and programs while providing general services to make sure that several software applications can operate accordingly.

Operating systems can be found in almost any type of a computer device such as personal computers, supercomputers, cellular telephones, and video game consoles as stated by Linux Systems (2011). As the research was being conducted for this paper, it raised a question whether the internet uses the operating system? It proved to be a challenge to actually pin point the most common operating systems on the Internet, but as the research continued, it was obvious that these three, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are considered to be the most common operating systems used on the Internet today.

Background of each Operating System

Windows

Privately owned operating systems, Microsoft Windows is generally used on personal computers and as of today, the most commonly used version is Windows XP with the new version of Windows 7 for personal computers and Windows Server 2008 R2 for servers is entering the market.

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a graphical operating system which is designed and distributed by Apple Incorporated is considered to be partially privately owned. Its latest version of software is pre-loaded on all of the Macintosh Computers and is also a UNIX operating system that uses advanced technology.

Linux

Is an operating system that can be used on a variety of devices such as personal computers, supercomputers, and some hand held devices. Linux Kernel is released by using an open source enabling users to interpret and make changes to the code.

How Does the Operating System work on the Internet?

The Internet OS coordinates access by other applications to the underlying resources of the devices such as CPU, memory, and disk storage, however, the operating system kernel will schedule processes, allocate memory, manage interruptions from other devices, take care of exceptions, and making sure that multiple applications is able to share the same hardware.

Since the internet is the communication network, services that are accessed by applications are not just device components and OS features, they are rather, data subsystems such as locations, social networks, indexes of websites, speech recognition, image recognition, and automated translation which actually live in the cloud, thus results to Cloud Computing.

We have introduced the Cloud