With all the recent hype surrounding Google's Chrome, it's refreshing to see someone taking a few steps back and looking at the bigger picture. Superlatives were abound about Chrome (I personally really like it), but some people really took it overboard - take TechCrunch for instance: "Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows." Seeing my nationality, I know a tulip mania when I see one. So does Ted Dziuba.
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Member since:2008-07-10
Member since:2006-02-15
No I mentioned GEOS not because it can draw to the screen but because it has one thing that many early OS's had the ability to switch running programs. An OS is the layer between Applications and the hardware not an application and the hardware. If you only have one application running ever you don't need an OS. What you may need is a set of libraries for similar applications but those libraries are not OS's.
CP/M, MS-DOS and all those are still OSes even though they don't boast multi-tasking capabilities. An OSes task is to allow the user load applications and manage their hardware. It also provides the applications with a common set of features they all can use without all the applications having to develop their own versions of hardware layers, memory managers and all. That is the task of an OS.
In short: OS is something that initializes everything to a common and known state and provides applications with method for utilizing a pre-defined set of functions like opening and saving of files, handling filesystems, memory and I/O. It is still an OS if it doesn't support multi-tasking.
Member since:
2007-10-26
The system, whereby the machine operates...
Don't be so dense it is possible to make a computer that has no OS. What came first the computer or the OS?
No I mentioned GEOS not because it can draw to the screen but because it has one thing that many early OS's had the ability to switch running programs. An OS is the layer between Applications and the hardware not an application and the hardware. If you only have one application running ever you don't need an OS. What you may need is a set of libraries for similar applications but those libraries are not OS's.