Operating Systems Design and Implementation - Essay Example

Some of the most common functionalities of any operating system are mentioned below: The history of Operating Systems starts as early as the first computing machine. It is a subject of great research and every generation is adding more features to the operating system making them more and more efficient. Modern operating systems can be broadly classified into two categories: Microsoft Windows is the most common household operating system widely present. Its success mainly is a result of its user interface which is very user-friendly.

Windows has a graphical user interface which makes it very easy for the user to select options and issue commands. XP was the latest success of the Windows family. The user interacts with the hardware in form of buttons, boxes, and images by clicking the mouse. Any layman without any experience working with computers can easily work on GUI-based operating systems. UNIX on the other hand is an operatingthatem which is not GUI based. Users working on UNIX have to remember commands and type the commands to achieve results.

Although UNIX is quite popular on the research front, it did not gain wide acceptability because of the lack of a graphical user interface. There is no wwell-definedfact as to which operation. There is no well-defined fact as to which operating system is better than the other. Every OS has its disciples and haters. Every commercially available OS has its pros and cons. Microsoft operating systems are easy to use but are expensive and low on security. Linux and UNIX on the other hand are freely available and extremely secure but lack a user-friendly user interface.

It depends on the type of user and his nature of requirements that finally decide which OS would be the best for him. Answer 2 An Operating System acts as an interface between the user and the computer. Although most users would have had some experience with an operating system, it is very difficult to precisely define the purpose of an operating system. This difficulty arrives mainly because an operating system performs two unrelated functions: Extended Machine and Resource Manager (Tanenbaum, 1987).

As an extended machine, the operating system assists the architectural components (Instruction Set, Memory, IO) to understand the user input, provides them with their requirements to solve the user problem, and gives the result back to the user. As a resource manager, the Operating System provides the users with a top-down view. The operating system performs the job of controlled and orderly allocation of processors, memory, and IO devices among the various tasks that are competing for them. Based on the above discussion the primary purposes of an Operating System can be enlisted under  Process Management: Process is defined as an instance of a program that is currently under execution (Stallings, 2002). 

A process needs certain resources such as CPU time, memory, files, and IO devices to accomplish its tasks.