Unit 3. DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEMS
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. The operating system is an essential component in a computer system. Application programs usually require an operating system to function. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers.
In the 1940s, the earliest electronic digital systems had no operating systems. Electronic systems of this time were programmed on rows of mechanical switches or by wires on plug boards. In the early 1950s, a computer could execute only one program at a time. The program on punched paper cardswas loaded into the machine, which worked until the program completed or crashed. Through the 1950s, many major features were introduced, including batch processing, input/output, buffering, multitasking, runtime libraries, link-loading, and programs for sorting records in files.
During the 1960s, IBM's OS/360 introduced the concept of a single OS spanning an entire product line. IBM's current mainframe operating systems are distant descendants of this original system and applications written for OS/360 can still be run on modern machines.OS/360 also was the first operating system to keep track of all of the system resources that are used. Several alternative operating systems were developed at that time, for example ACP, SCOPE, B5000, MUSIC, etc., and all of them were run on huge mainframe computers.
The first microcomputers often loaded minimalistic operating systems from ROM. One of the early disk operating system was CP/M, which was supported on many early microcomputers. Later it was closely imitated by Microsoft's MS-DOS, which became very popular. In the 1980s, Apple Computer Inc. introduced the Apple Macintosh computer with an innovative Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the Mac OS.
The introduction of the Intel 80386 CPU chip with 32-bit architecture provided personal computers with the ability to run multitasking operating systems. Microsoft responded to this progress by developing the VMS operating system. Thatled to the development of the Windows NT, which continues to serve as the basis for Microsoft's operating systems line. Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Apple Inc., started NeXT Computer Inc., which developed the NEXTSTEP operating system. NEXTSTEP would later be acquired by Apple Inc. and used as the core of Mac OS X.
The GNU Project was started by an activist and programmer Richard Stallman with the goal of creating a free software to replace the proprietary UNIX operating system. In 1991, a Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds released the first version of the Linux kernel. It was soon merged with the GNU components and system software to form a complete operating system. Since then, the combination of the two major components has usually been called "Linux" by the software industry. The Berkeley Software Distribution, known as BSD, is the UNIX derivative distributed by the University of California, starting in the 1970s. Freely distributed and ported to many minicomputers, it is also used on PCs, mainly as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Translate words and phrases (from the text) from English into Russian.
Memory allocation // to distribute freely // multitasking // to run an application // to respond to progress // an essential component // OS kernel // batch processing // an intermediary between software and hardware // to require // to develop a new OS // to sort records.