The System Software Comprises of four programs, namely, diagnostic routing, bootstrap loader basic input output system (BIOS) and operating system. Among these software, diagnostic routing bootstrap loader and BIOS are hard coded into chips on the mother board of a computer. In contrast, the operating system is a software which can be stored into a floppy or hard disk. since, the first three software is built into the motherboard, the user has nothing to do with them However, all users need to learn about the operating system with what they interact
Note that the first three software deals with low level machine information sush as devices attached to the computer, CPU and memory handling, type of operating systems to be used, etc. the selected operating system will be able to run on a particular computer only if these three programs allow it. If you carefully notice, you can observe that these programs run at the time of booting the machine before loading the operating system
Operating systems
Among other programs within the system software, the operating system is the one which is directly relevant to the user. Therefore, some people talk of operating system as if it is the only software within the system software
The operating system contains a number of programs which can be used to control different aspects of the computer. For example, access of various devices such as hard disks, CD-ROM memory port, etc. is completely handled by the instructions’ provided in the operating system. Further system-wide facilities such as copy, format, delete, etc. are also essential services of an operating system. Another important service of an operating system is known as the “Command interpreter”. The command interpreter acts as the interface between the BIOS ( and thus the hardware) and any commands you may wish to pass onto the computer. The operating system acts the role of translating the commands ( instructions), and those of our software, into low level instructions the hardware and Bios can understand. The operating system actually implements our commands on the computer.
Note that what application software you can run on your machine is totally dependent on the operating system that you have. Every time application software is written keeping a particular operating system in mind. You hardly find an application software which runs on all operating system
Some Operating system
- MS-DOS
- OS/2
- Windows
- Unix
- Linux
- Mac OS
