Operating Systems
10 Great Features in 10 Different OSes If you were making the ultimate operating system, what features would you choose? Here's one take on the best of the best from Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Unix, iOS, Windows and more. By Terrence Dorsey. I've been fortunate to use a pretty wide range of OSes over the years - some by choice, others by necessity. I'm no fanboy, but some of those systems left a better impression than others. Almost every OS, though, has something about it that's unique or revolutionary or just helps you get the work done and on to other things.
And sometimes a feature of the OS just grabs your attention and forces you to dig further, understand how it works, and master all it can do. Each OS has some nugget that we can enjoy, learn from and build on. So here, in no particular order, are 10 different features I love in 10 different OSes. Mac OS X, Time Machine.
Configuring backups has, traditionally, been one of the least fun things about computing. It's perhaps only slightly less frustrating than trying to recover your system from said backup.
If you don't have too many files to back up, services like Dropbox, Sugarsync, and Windows Live Mesh work quite well. In fact, for several years I used Live Sync (formerly Foldershare, now called Live Mesh) to create real-time offsite backups of my most important files. But you can't back up and recover an entire system that way. Apple introduced Time Machine backup software with Mac OS X 10.5 in 2007, and I have to say it's one of the more brilliant tools I've used. Time Machine is easy to configure and pretty much operates as a set-and-forget service.
You can back up to a local drive connected via USB or Firewire or even to network storage via Ethernet or WiFi. As long as your backup volume is available, Time Machine creates hourly, daily and weekly incremental backups of your system. When trouble strikes, you can go into the Time Machine and recover previous versions of individual files or even the entire system.
It's not perfect, but so far I've been successful in all of my attempts at recovery with Time Machine. I've even used Time Machine backups to restore all of a user's files from an older, failing machine to a new one. Unix, The Shell Terminal The terminal was my first experience of computing.and by terminal I mean a teleprinter terminal: typewriter keys and a continuous roll of paper scrolling up line by line. The shell was also, for a long time, my portal to the Internet. Then there was MS-DOS.
Command line computing lives on, and is even making something of a comeback among users of graphical UI operating systems. Linux and Mac OS X still have their terminal fanboys. And of course you've got a selection of shells, from the original Bourne shell to bash, C, dash, Korn and Z, not to mention fish, psh, rc, scsh, wish and zoidberg. Windows had its roots in the MS-DOS command line, and continues to this day with the 'DOS box' command prompt, cmd.exe. There's Windows PowerShell if you want a more robust scripting environment in Windows, and Cygwin if you prefer something more in line with the traditional Unix terminal. There's always tension between command-line and graphical interfaces, and for the last decade or more, GUIs have been the dominant face of most OSes.
But as Max Steenbergen writes in his article 'Commands Lines: Alive & Kicking' for UX Magazine, the command line is making a comeback via app launchers like Alfred, Launchy and GNOME Do. Even applications like Google Chrome and Wolfram Alpha are blurring the line between textual search and command-line scripting. Bringing the command line full-circle, a clever coder even built a personal Web site that hosts a command line in the browser window. Retro, or a step into the future? Ubuntu, Simplified Linux Setup.
Much of the Linux revolution has been powered by hackers of the first order. While getting a Linux system up and running isn't rocket science, it does take quite a bit of planning (is my hardware compatible?), knowledge (sudo what?) and time (I've got work to do.). Of course, once you figure those details out, you end up with a powerful, highly customizable and secure system that runs well even on modest hardware. Over the years, increasingly easy access to configuration and installation information via the internet has helped Linux reach a broader audience.
A large and growing list of high-quality, free, open-source software for Linux also contributes to its appeal. Still, the learning curve has been steep and the availability of over two hundred different Linux distros makes the choice of where to start difficult. That is until the release of the Debian-derived Ubuntu in 2004. Ubuntu aims for easy installation and configuration, and that's been my experience so far. You can download a live CD ISO or a Windows installer to get going. It doesn't require much of a commitment if you just want to give Ubuntu a try.
Burn the ISO to CD and boot from that, or install it in a virtual machine using VirtualBox, Virtual PC or VMWare Player. The Ubuntu installation includes a lot of software, so you can start playing or working with right away: e-mail and chat apps, Firefox and Chrome browsers, media apps and OpenOffice, among many others. And of course, Linux offers a cornucopia of tools for the developer. The Ubuntu Software Center gives you one-click access to a huge library of apps, and updating your software is simple and automatic (and much less intrusive than Windows Update). BeOS, 64-Bit Journaling File System.
When Jean Louis Gasse left Apple, he founded a new team that created the charming and forward-looking BeOS in 1991. At the time, BeOS featured some pretty radical technology.
Designed from the ground up as an efficient, lightweight multithreaded system with preemptive multitasking, it was very fast on modest hardware and scaled up to take advantage of any processors on the system (in those days, rarely more than two, but still.). The file system included with BeOS, however, is one of its truly cool features.
All Types Of Operating Systems
Called BFS (BeOS File System), it was a 64-bit journaling file system using file attributes, or metadata. The ability to query and sort against file metadata gave BFS some relational database-like quality similar to what we may finally see via WinFS in Windows 8. The 64-bit address space gave BFS the theoretical ability to support volumes of more than eight exobytes and files over 30 GB. This at a time when 30 GB hard drives were hardly commonplace.
Coupled with BeOS's performance-focused multithreaded core, BFS could provide high-performance streaming read, write and query access to storage with the ability to recover quickly after a failure. This made BeOS well-suited for audio and video manipulation, a task that it still accomplishes today in high-end media production systems. There's a lot more to understand about the technical details of BFS.
If you're curious to know more, take a look at at Ars Technica titled 'The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective,' along with at The Register. BeOS faded away as a commercial OS, but there's still a small, loyal group of enthusiasts keeping the flame burning. If you can find a BeOS 5 CD, it'll probably run on most commodity x86 hardware. Software is available from the BeBits repository. In addition, the Haiku project is an ongoing community effort to build a source-compatible open-source version of BeOS. They recently dropped an Alpha 2 release that's reasonably stable and runs most of the available legacy code. IRIX, SGI Dogfight Back in the early '90s, my employer struck a deal with Silicon Graphics to port our software to IRIX.
I recall some Indy and Indigo boxes arriving at the office and a lot of oohing and ahhing among the staff. I don't recall whether we actually completed the ports - probably not, given the state of things in the office. But as the eager young kid in the office I was given the exciting job of helping to set up the machines, which for the most part meant loading up applications from various tapes. While waiting for the tapes to load up and spill their data, I did have a chance to explore the system. And one of the items I discovered hidden in the demos was a little gem called Dogfight. This little app was a 3D flight simulator that featured IP multicast-based multiplayer air combat over our humble little Ethernet network.
Sure, it had frame rates and polygon counts you'd laugh at today, but at the time we'd never seen anything like it. The first components of what would become the Dogfight demo were created by Gary Tarolli in the early '80s.
OK, technically Dogfight wasn't an OS feature like some of the other items we've discussed here, but it was designed specifically to highlight the advanced (for the time) 3D rendering capabilities of SGI's systems. Building on his experience with IRIX and Dogfight, Tarolli went on to co-found 3dfx, which produced the Voodoo 3D graphics cards and Glide API - used by some ground-breaking 3D PC games. NeXTSTEP, Right-Click Context Menu According to Wikipedia, the right-click 'popup' menu technically originated in Xerox Alto's smalltalk environment. (We've all had a chance to play with one of those, right?) But the first time I experienced the right-click menu was when exploring NeXTSTEP on a friend's then-new NeXTstation. That makes some sense as there's an easily drawn line of inspiration from Alto to Macintosh to NeXT.
While Mac OS did not embrace the right-click context menu until much later, it was an OS feature from the start in NeXTSTEP. Of course, the context menu has become an intrinsic part of Windows, to the extent that it's possible to use right-clicking on pretty much anything in Windows or a Windows-based application as a discoverability tool. No need to look it up, just right-click and see what the options are. You could say the context menus provide useful task hints and shortcuts not unlike Tab command completion in a terminal or IDE. That said, there are problems with the right-click context menu as currently implemented. First, the Windows context menu is getting rather unwieldy as it fills up with useful - and esoteric - options.
Install a few applications that have shell integration and you can end up with a menu that contains nearly 20 items. On top of that, the APIs for shell integration make customizing the context menu difficult for anyone but programmers and superusers.
MS-DOS, BASIC. MS-DOS was undeniably the dominant desktop operating system throughout the '80s, and every one of those computers running MS-DOS included the Microsoft BASIC programming language in one form or another. In fact, the version of BASIC created by Paul Allen and Bill Gates predates even MS-DOS, originating as Altair BASIC in the '70s. The BASIC language tools included in MS-DOS evolved over the years to include rudimentary Integrated Development Environment (IDE) features and a compiler for faster execution of programs. Microsoft BASIC, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC and QBasic ultimately evolved into the Visual Basic language we know today, acquiring millions of enthusiasts along the way. More recently, Microsoft DevLabs released an updated Windows interpretation of QBasic called Small Basic, which is intended to be used as a tool for teaching and experimentation.
What's significant about Microsoft BASIC is that it was shipped on tens of millions of computers - in many cases, the first personal computers to make their way into offices and homes. It was the first opportunity to explore programming for a generation of computer users. Unless you worked in a technical occupation or studied computer science, your first exposure to programming most likely would have been through BASIC on MS-DOS.
Hats off to Microsoft for democratizing the art of programming.
An performs all the basic tasks like managing file,process, and memory. Thus operating system acts as manager of all the resources, i.e. Resource manager. Thus operating system becomes an interface between user and machine.
Types of Operating Systems: Some of the widely used operating systems are as follows- 1. Batch Operating System – This type of operating system do not interact with the computer directly. There is an operator which takes similar jobs having same requirement and group them into batches. It is the responsibility of operator to sort the jobs with similar needs. Advantages of Batch Operating System:.
It is very difficult to guess or know the time required by any job to complete. Processors of the batch systems knows how long the job would be when it is in queue. Multiple users can share the batch systems. The idle time batch system is very less. It is easy to manage large work repeatedly in batch systems Disadvantages of Batch Operating System:. The computer operators should be well known with batch systems.
Batch systems are hard to debug. It is sometime costly. The other jobs will have to wait for an unknown time if any job fails Examples of Batch based Operating System: Payroll System, Bank Statements etc. Time-Sharing Operating Systems – Each task has given some time to execute, so that all the tasks work smoothly.
Each user gets time of CPU as they use single system. These systems are also known as Multitasking Systems. The task can be from single user or from different users also. The time that each task gets to execute is called quantum. After this time interval is over OS switches over to next task. Advantages of Time-Sharing OS:. Each task gets an equal opportunity.
Operating Systems List
Less chances of duplication of software. CPU idle time can be reduced Disadvantages of Time-Sharing OS:. Reliability problem. One must have to take care of security and integrity of user programs and data. Data communication problem Examples of Time-Sharing OSs are: Multics, Unix etc. Distributed Operating System – These types of operating system is a recent advancement in the world of computer technology and are being widely accepted all-over the world and, that too, with a great pace.
Various autonomous interconnected computers communicate each other using a shared communication network. Independent systems possess their own memory unit and CPU. These are referred as loosely coupled systems or distributed systems.
These systems processors differ in sizes and functions. The major benefit of working with these types of operating system is that it is always possible that one user can access the files or software which are not actually present on his system but on some other system connected within this network i.e., remote access is enabled within the devices connected in that network.