What Does OS Mean, a Simple Way to Understand This Computer Term

In this article I’m going to help you understand a common computer term: “operating system”, or “OS”.

If you find yourself with questions and think what is operating system, if so, you’re  not the only one to wonder this.

This actually is a fairly simple idea to make sense of when it’s explained right, as you’ll find once you finish learning from this basic computer lesson.

Now an operating system, or OS,is one type of software.

To recap my explanation from a previous article, here’s how you can think of software:

“Software” refers to all of the pieces of the computer that you can’t really observe or touch directly. Software would include things like a word processor, an email program like Outlook, Windows or the Mac OS, plus all of your personal files like specific emails, pictures, music, and more.

Here’s how you can 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.

Are you getting the idea now?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 a couple versions of Microsoft Windows.  While Mac OS 10.4 ( also known as”Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 ( also known as”Leopard”) are two different versions of Mac OS X.

Alright then so what is an OS?

Think of it this way:when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, etc., and they also have the instinct to watch, listen, and absorb what’s going on around them.

Gradually over time, a young child learns to talk and walk by watching others, and as they grow up, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, and so on.

So in other words, they gradually transition from being able to do not a lot except eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the general skills a person needs to go on to more specific skills such as learning to drive, playing a sport like basketball, writing a paper for a class, getting a job ,etc.

In a lot of ways, when you turn a computer on, it’s sort of like a newborn baby, only having one or two basic”instincts.”

It can power on, and show a picture on the screen, but that’s pretty much it.

The only other thing it can do is check the hard drive, and if it finds an OS there, the computer 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 when you can actually start using it.

And the best way to think about it is that it’s just like a child being born and growing up: the operating system has 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’s as if your PC is “born” and “grows up” in the space of thirty to sixty seconds or so( or longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the OS.

So in other words, the operating system is much like those basic skills we all have and learned as we grew up. More specifically, it’s the software on your computer that creates the desktop, the icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen when you move your mouse around, allows you to work with files, lets you type, etc..

Without the OS, you couldn’t do anything with the PC but push the power button and see useless information such as”non system disk or disk error” on a Windows-type computer, or a flashing question mark on a Macintosh computer.

So even though most people don’t fully understand what an OS is, or what it’s for, you couldn’t use your PC without having one.

Now you understand what an OS is for and what it does.