What is an Operating System?
An operating system is the software that provides the basic functionality required to run the applications programs on your computer. It provides an interface between the applications programs and the computer hardware and makes the programs independent of the specific hardware that your computer contains.
Modern operating systems also provide a graphical interface. This interface is accessed by programs via an Application Programming Interface (API) that provide all of the standard functions that all programs require in order to interact with the screen, keyboard, and mouse. This ensures that all programs behave the same way with regard to these standard functions meaning that once you know how one program works on the operating system that you can reasonably expect other programs to behave similarly. It also reduces the requirement for programmers to provide their own versions of these standard functions.
Current versions of operating systems include Windows ME (previous versions were called DOS and Windows 95/98), Windows XP (previous versions were Windows NT and 2000), eComstation (previous versions were called OS/2), Linux, and BeOS.
