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Showing posts from May, 2015

Operating Systems: The Personalities of Computers

Sample of BASH through a shell in GNOME. Screenshot taken in Arch Linux (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 4, 2015 Deadline June 2015 Issue Personal computer and device operating systems are the personalities of the machines. The choices we make when selecting an operating system , or the choices we have made for us, determine how we interact with the digital world. Regardless of whether you prefer (or need to use) Windows, OS X , Linux or BSD , the operating systems do the same basic work. Click a mouse button, tap a touchscreen or type a letter and the operating system converts your action into something applications understand. The operating system determines how to manage software tasks and communicates with the hardware of a device to send or receive data. Operating systems accept commands or actions from users and software (input) and then display, print or otherwise communicate the results of these commands (output) to other software or the h