An operating system (OS) is system software that manages the hardware and software resources of the computer and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require an operating system to operate. Time-sharing operating systems plan tasks for efficient system use and may also include accounting software for allocating processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources.
For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between the programs and the hardware of the computer, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and often makes calls from the computer. System to an OS function or is interrupted by that. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer - from cell phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers.
The dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83.3%. MacOS of Apple Inc. occupies the second place (11.2%) and the varieties of Linux occupy the third position (1,55%). In the mobile sector (smartphones and combined tablets), according to data for the third quarter of 2016, Google Android dominates with 87.5 percent and a growth rate of 10.3 percent a year, followed by iOS by Apple with 12 , 1 percent and a decrease per year in the market of 5.2 percent, while other operating systems amounted to only 0.3 percent. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputer sectors. There are other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, for many applications.
The first computers were built to perform a number of unique tasks, such as a calculator. Basic operating system functions were developed in the 1950s, as resident monitor functions that could automatically run different programs in succession to speed up processing. Operating systems did not exist in their modern and more complex forms until the early 1960s. Added hardware features, which allowed the use of run-time libraries, interrupts, and parallel processing. When personal computers became popular in the 1980s, the operating systems were made for them similar in concept to those used on larger computers.
In the 1940s, the first digital electronic systems had no operating systems. The electronic systems of this time were programmed in rows of mechanical switches or by jumper cables in plug cards. These were special systems that, for example, generated ballistic tables for the military or controlled the printing of payroll checks from punch card data. After inventing the general purpose programmable computers, machine languages (consisting of strings of binary digits 0 and 1 on the perforated paper tape) were introduced which accelerated the programming process (Stern, 1981).
