Operating System

Whenever you start any electronics, you are greeted with some icon, maybe some text and imagery as well. This screen serves as loading screen for your operating system, which itself is a system software. It falls in this category because it serves as medium between your hardware and the applications that you are actually going to use. An operating system manages hardware resources automatically for you so you get a seamless interaction with your device. There are multiple types of operating systems out there.

1. Single Tasking
2. Multi-tasking
3. Embedded OS
4. Real-time OS
5. Distributed

Early machines built by humans were analog machines and these machines were built to do just one thing. These machines did not have an operating system. It took many workers to achieve the same task over and over by using multiple mechanical switches or jumper wires on plug-boards. These tasks may include complex calculations. Slowly, analog machines were replaced with digital machines which could run the same tasks much faster than before but it would machine language code to do the same. The early programming languages enabled humans to achieve much more but early computers were single tasking machines and they could only execute one task at a time. Slowly, multi-tasking machines were built but managing these tasks without an operating system proved to be difficult. Therefore, operating systems were created to manage machines resources to better handle multi-tasking on the newer machines. 

Multi-Tasking Operating System

The most widely known operating systems are under multi-tasking. You may have used some if not all types of above-mentioned operating systems in your life. However, most of the operating systems that we are mostly going to talk about on this blog fall under the category of Multi-tasking operating systems. These operating systems can manage multiple tasks at once. These tasks can be multiple applications you are using on your computer or mobile phones. This category of operating systems are widely used by most of the people in the world. However, other types of operating systems have their own use case and advantages as well.

A multi-tasking operating system usually includes a kernel, which provides basic level control over the hardware. Drivers are essential part of any operating system which lets your operating system to talk to your hardware. System libraries are added for more functionality. System utilities are also added for executing basic tasks such as managing your system processes, checking memory usage and much more. A number of applications such as calculator, text editor, web browser etc. may also come pre-installed with your operating system. The Multi-Tasking category includes the following operating system:

1. Microsoft Windows
2. macOS on apple machines
   
3. All Linux distributions
4. BSD and its descendants
5. Android on mobile phones

Kernel of OS

The above-mentioned operating systems may fall under the same category but they may be built differently. The major difference however lies in the kernel design. There are way too many kernel designs out there. But the following kernel designs are widely used today when creating an operating system. 

1. Monolithic Kernel for speedy computing (Unix, Linux and many BSD distros)
   
2. Micro-Kernel for security (Redox, GNU Hurd and others)
3. Hybrid Kernel for optimal performance (NT for Windows and XNU for macOS)

Other major kernel designs include Exo-Kernel and Nano-Kernel. We will learn more about many operating system on this blog and maybe even compare them with each other. Since I am an advocate of open source software, you will see a lot of blog posts about Linux and other open source projects. 

This was the very basic information about operating systems. We will expand operating system and kernel types in the future blog posts.