Operating Systems: Current Development of Windows and Linux

INTRODUCTION

An operating system is a collection of programs written in low level languages that control the resources of a computer. It manages the computer's memory, processes, and all of its software and hardware. Operating system acts as an interface between the users and the hardware which allows the user to communicate with the computer without a language barrier. Booting is the process that occurs when users press the power button to turn the computer on. During this process, the computer runs tests to make sure everything is working correctly, checks for new hardware and then starts up the operating system by loading it into the main memory. The operating system ensures the best use of the computer resources and provides background for execution of the user's program. The operating system also acts as a system protection by displaying and dealing with errors in the computer system and control the selection and operation of the peripherals. A good operating system is efficient, small in size and reliable.

HISTORY

Early history of the 1940s and the 1950s:

In the 1940s, the earliest electronic digital systems had no operating systems. Computers of this time were so primitive compared to those of today that programs were often entered into the computer one bit at a time on rows of mechanical switches. Eventually, machine languages consisting of strings of the binary digits 0 and 1 were introduced that speed up the programming process. The systems of the 1950s generally ran only one job at a time.

The history of 1960s born the era of timesharing and multiprogramming:

The systems of the 1960s were also batch processing systems but they were able to take better advantage of the computer resources by running sev...

... middle of paper ...

... to fix them. Everything can be controlled through GUI and incompatibility problems are rare.

GRAPHIC PERFORMANCE NVidia, often does not provide documentation for linux developers, drivers cannot use full card performance. Combined with newest DirectX versions and full graphics card support the performance is almost as good as it can get.

COMPANY/ DEVELOPER Linus Torvalds Microsoft

LICENSE GNU/ Free Proprietary

SUPPORT PLATFORMS All PowerPC: versions 1.0 – NT 4.0;

DEC Alpha: versions 1.0 – NT 4.0;

MIPS R4000: versions 1.0 – NT 4.0;

IA-32: versions 1.0 – 8;

IA-64: versions XP; x86-64: versions XP-8;

ARM: versions RT;

DEFAULT USER INTERFACE Gnome or KDE

(Depends on distro) Graphical (Windows Aero)

PRECEED BY Basic Terminal (CLI) MS-DOS

SOURCE MODEL Open Source Closed or Shared Source

UPDATE METHOD Many Window Update

TERMINAL Multi Terminal Windows -