What’s OS - A Plain English Explanation

Reviewed by Bram P

What is an operating system

In this article I’m going to clarify common but frequently confused computer terminology: “operating system“, or “OS”.

Maybe you’ve found yourself with questions and wonder what OS means, if so, you’re not the only one.

This is actually a fairly simple idea to grasp when it’s explained right, as you’ll discover by the time you finish reading this computer dictionary article.

Now an operating system, or OS, is a type of software. To repeat my explanation from a previous article, here’s how you can think of software: “Software” refers to all of the parts of the computer that you really can’t observe or touch directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Word, a Web browser, Windows or the Mac OS, and all of your personal files like specific emails, photos, songs, etc.

Here’s how you can think about it: hardware is like your brain, a physical part of your body, while software is like your mind or your thoughts — the non-physical part of yourself. Software runs on hardware, just like your thoughts “run on” your brain.

Make sense? So let’s look at the operating system specifically

So, let me give a couple of examples:  the two best known operating systems right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).

Windows XP and Windows Vista are a couple versions of Windows.  While Mac OS 10.4 (a.k.a “Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 (a.k.a “Leopard”) are two different versions of Mac OS X.

OK, so what is an OS?

Here’s how to think about it: when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, etc., and also the instinct to observe and soak up everything going on around them.

In time, a young person learns to talk and walk by learning from others, and as they mature, they also learn more fundamental skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, etc.

Another way to say this is, they gradually transition from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the basic skills a person needs to learn more specialized skills like learning to drive, playing a sport like football, writing an essay for school, getting a job — you get the idea.

In some ways, when you start up a computer, it’s just like a newborn baby, only having a couple of basic “instincts.” It can turn on, and display an image on the monitor, but not a lot more. The only other thing it can do is look at the hard drive, and if it finds the files it needs there, the computer is able to start running the OS. This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and before you’re able to actually start using it.

So in other words, it’s just like a child being born and growing up: the OS has the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills equivalent to walking, talking, reading, writing, and so on, that lets everything else take place.

So it’s kind of as if your PC is “born” and “grows up” in the space of thirty to sixty seconds or so (sometimes longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the OS. So, the OS is much like those basic skills we all have and learned as kids. More precisely, it’s the software on the computer that creates your desktop, its icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen as you move your mouse around, allows you to view and open files, lets you type, and so on.

Without the OS, you couldn’t do anything with your PC but turn it on and see an unhelpful message such as “non system disk or disk error” on a Windows-style computer, or a flashing question mark on a Mac.

So even though many computer users don’t really understand what an OS is, or what it does, you couldn’t use your PC without one.

Now you have a basic understanding of what an operating system is and what it does.

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