What Does OS Mean
In this article I’m going to make sense of normally confusing computer terms: “operating system”, or “OS”.
Maybe you’ve found yourself with questions and wonder what is operating system, if so, you’re not the only one to wonder this.
This is actually a fairly simple concept to make sense of when you have it explained the right way, as you’ll discover by the time you finish reading this computer dictionary article.
Now an operating system, or OS, is a type of software.
If you aren’t sure what I mean by software, let me explain:
“Software” would be all of the parts of the computer that you can’t really observe or handle directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Excel, your email program, Windows or the Mac OS, plus all of your own files like specific emails, pictures, songs, and more.
Here’s another way to think about it: hardware is like your brain, a physical part of your body, while software is like your mind or your thoughts — the non-physical part of yourself.
Software runs on hardware, just like your thoughts “run on” your brain.
Does that make sense? So let’s talk about the OS specifically.
First off, let me give a couple of examples: the two best known OS right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).
Windows XP and Windows Vista are two versions of Windows. While Mac OS 10.4 (a.k.a “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (also called “Leopard”) are two examples of versions of Mac OS X.
Alright then so what is an OS?
Think about it like this: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, and so on, and they also have the instinct to watch, listen, and absorb what’s going on around them.
Gradually over time, a young person learns to talk and walk by learning from others, and as they grow up, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, etc.
So basically, they gradually transition from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the common skills they need to learn more specialized skills like driving a car, playing a sport like hockey, writing an essay for school, working a job — you get the idea.
In many ways, when you power up your computer, it’s just like a newborn baby, only having a few built-in “instincts.”
It is able to turn on, and show a picture on the monitor, but that’s pretty much it.
The only other thing the computer can do is check the hard drive, and if the computer finds the files it needs there, it is able to load the info into memory for use.
That process is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and before you can actually start using it.
So in other words, it’s just like a child being born and growing up: the OS contains the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills equivalent to walking, talking, reading, writing, etc., that lets everything else take place.
So in a sense, it’slike your PC is “born” and “grows up” in the space of 30 seconds to a minute or so (or longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the OS.
In other words, the operating system is much like those fundamental skills we all have and learned when we were young. More specifically, it’s the software on a computer that creates your desktop, your icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen as you move your mouse around,allows you to view and open files, lets you type, — you get the idea.
Without the OS, you couldn’t do anything with your computer but turn it on and see an unhelpful message such as “non system disk or disk error” on a Windows PC, or a flashing question mark on one of Apple’s Macs.
So even though a lot of people don’t really understand what an OS is, or what it does, we couldn’t use a PC without having one.
Now you have a basic understanding of what an operating system is and what it does.
