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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Operating systems
Whenever you are using a computer you interact with it with the help of an operating system (OS), a vital interface between the hardware and the user. The operating system does a number of different things. For example, multiple programs are often run at the same time and in this situation the operating system allocates resources to the different programs or may be able to appropriately interrupt programs. Another common feature of an operating system is a graphical user interface (GUI), originally developed for personal computers. Examples of popular operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Linux is an example of a Unix (or ‘Unix-like’) operating system. Unix was originally developed in 1969 at Bell Laboratories in the United States. Many different flavours of the Unix OS have been developed, such as Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, and there are a number of freely available Unix or Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux in different distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE and Ubuntu.
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