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UNDERSTANDING OPERATING SYSTEM
An Operating System is a system software which acts as an interface between the user and the computer. It is an important
component of a computer system which controls all other components of the computer system. It helps us to communicate
with the computer without knowing its language. Without an Operating System the computer is of no use. Some of the
commonly used Operating Systems are Windows, DOS, UNIX, etc. Let us learn more about these operating systems.
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Operating
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Operating System
UNIX
Unix is one of the oldest, reliable and powerful Operating Systems developed at AT&T’s Bell
Laboratories in the early 1970’s. It has a simple user interface called Shell which interacts with the
kernel to get the work done. Some of its important features are:
• It has a character user interface.
• It supports multiuser and multitasking. Several users can run multiple programs or processes Unix
simultaneously on one system.
• It has machine independent architecture written in high level language.
• It has a hierarchical file system to represent information.
Disk Operating System (DOS)
After UNIX, DOS is one of the most commonly used Operating Systems. It was written originally by Tim Patterson— Father
of DOS and owned by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft released it with an IBM PC as MS-DOS 1.0 in 1982. It has
the following important features:
DOS
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