Chapter 9 Operating Systems
A computer’s Operating System is the software that manages the low-level functions of the computer and provides a platform for other software to run. The earliest computers did not have operating systems, every program dealt directly with the hardware of the computer and human operators figured out what program would run when. Operating systems were designed to make more efficient use of the computer hardware, by allowing many programs to be queued up and run in quick succession, and of a programmer’s time, by handling some of the tricky low-level management tasks so individual programs do not have to.
