Types of Computer Operating Systems

Where do I start? My first computer was given by my uncle. I don’t think it had an operating system because it didn’t even have a hard disk. It had two huge and distinctive 5.25” floppy disk drives. There were several 5.25” diskettes that came with it and the only one that I can remember is an arcade racing game. The idea was that the car will have to avoid crashing into oncoming cars by moving it left and right. Well, it may not sound fun now but trust me, I was amazed by it so much that I could literally play for hours and hours.

Disk Operating System - DOS

I soon became bored with it and it was left accumulating dusts. DOS came into my life when my father bought our family first computer in 1993. It was an Intel Pentium 80286. In case you don’t know, the speediest Intel Pentium 80286 was 12.5MHz. The whole set of computer with a dot-matrix printer cost MYR5,000 (around £1250) in the year 1993.

If you are interested in checking exchange rate history, check out X-Rates.

DOS is everything about commands; deleting, moving and copying files, launch programs, create directory. You just have to know the program and path to make it efficient for you. You do get to play DOS games like Double Dragon, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Test Drive and the likes with graphical user interface. To date, I still have some of those DOS games and my favourite of them all is Romance of the Three Kingdom 2.

Windows

By now, we are all very familiar with Windows operating system. It is the most used operating systems and it is still growing. My history with Windows would start with Windows 3.1. It worked as an add-on to DOS, thus providing the graphical user interface (GUI). With Windows, mouse seemed to be more useful at that time.

I then moved on to Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows Vista and now Windows 7. Of course, I have to constantly upgrade and change my computers in order to keep up with these operating systems.

I have mentioned that Windows 3.1 was like an add-on to DOS but the Windows today, DOS is merely one of the programs that come with Windows. It is not the backbone of Windows anymore.

Mac OS X

Mac operating system has come a long way to. It started about the same time as when Windows 1.0 was introduced. However, Microsoft Windows was already dominating the market. My personal view is that IBM was very influential and strong in the computer world at that time. With both Microsoft and IBM working together, Windows was able to push its products to every IBM users, which was of course more than Apple users.

Apple had its own hardware specifications and Mac operating system was designed to match the hardware. Its processor was called PowerPC and unsurprisingly, you couldn’t install Mac OS X on an Intel PC which was why Apple products were a bit exclusive.

But not anymore! Apple has started changing its product lines to use Intel processor in 2006. The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is the start of Mac operating system that supports only Intel processors. The more popular version of Mac OS X are:-

1. Cheetah (10.0)

2. Puma (10.1)

3. Jaguar (10.2)

4. Panther (10.3)

5. Tiger (10.4)

6. Leopard (10.5)

7. Snow Leopard (10.6)

8. Lion (10.7)

Apple’s migration to Intel has given the opportunity for PC users a taste of Mac OS X. If you have a PC with similar specifications to Apple iMac or MacBook range, most likely you will be able to install Mac OS X on your PC. I have installed Mac OS X Leopard on my Samsung NC10 netbook and it did work. Unfortunately, there were quite a lot of random crashes and the WiFi card worked intermittently.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page provides all the necessary information to install Mac OS X on your computer. If you are familiar with installing Windows yourself, it is as easy as that.

Linux

Linux is a free Operating System and it gets update regularly. It is quite similar to how Mac OS X operates. The two most popular user interface are GNOME and KDE. The most popular distribution of Linux is Ubuntu. I have too installed Ubuntu on my Samsung NC10 and it worked quite well.

Linux is free and open source in a way that you can do anything you like to it. In fact, Google Android is based on modified version of Linux kernel. So, imagine how much customisation has gone into the transition from Linux to Android.

Honestly, having installed and used both Linux Red Hat and Linux Ubuntu before, I am still not quite sure why there are so many version of Linux in the market. I guess as it is free and open source, everyone tries to get their hands on creating a Linux operating system but with a different feel.

To some people, changing operating system sounds like a big task. Afraid not as you can actually install Linux Ubuntu on a thumb drive. Once installed, you can start using Linux Ubuntu from the thumb drive and test it out. If you are happy with it, you can easily install Linux Ubuntu from the thumb drive too. Just make sure that you have backup your files! More worries? Worry not as the instructions are as easy as it can be!

Chrome OS, MeeGo, Linux Unity

All three operating systems target the netbook market at the moment. Chrome OS is on the rise and it even has its own ChromeBook. When I first installed ChromeOS, I don’t actually know what I could do with it. Essentially, it is an operating system in a Chrome browser. What I could do with the ChromeOS at that time was only to browse the internet, nothing else.

Today, Google Chrome browser has apps and games that you can install. You don’t even need to have ChromeOS in order to have apps and games. ChromeOS is just there as an option to a lightweight operating system which is why it is suitable for netbook. Windows is still deemed to be too heavy for day to day netbook operation.

MeeGo is like a social network operating system. You will feel as if you are using a mobile phone on your netbook or your netbook has been transform into a tablet. You can access to Facebook and Twitter easily and it shows you all the feeds in one screen. Other than social network application, there’s also a media library and email application.

Linux Unity derives from Ubuntu and it works almost like MeeGo with a touch of Ubuntu. After all, all three of them are using Linux kernel for a start.

BeOS and OS Haiku

BeOS was in the operating system environment for around six years before discontinued. OS Haiku which is inspired by BeOS, picked up where BeOS left. Haiku claims to be fast, efficient and easy to use and it’s not a product of Linux.

Personally, I can’t really comment these OSes as I have never used them before. Besides the discontinued BeOS and Haiku, there are also FreeMint, openVM, MorphOS, AmigaOS and the likes.

Server Operating Systems

In this category, we have Novell, Windows Server 2008, UNIX and Linux operating systems. They are not really suitable for day to day client operations. They are more like a host that let you share files within the same network as well as running programs centrally.

Finally…

Apart from Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, every other OSes mentioned here are free for use. Best of all, there are no viruses, malware or spyware. Having said that, the number of programs available on these OSes is rather limited and even if you have the money to spend, you will not be able to a copy of Microsoft Office that will work on Linux.

OpenOffice and NeoOffice may be the solution but the incompatibility in the document formatting means it’s almost useless when your customer is using Microsoft Office while you use OpenOffice to design a brochure or template.

It seems to me that the lack of software in these free OSes means that they will be forever left behind by the two giant operating system; Windows and Mac OS X. ChromeOS may change the way we work by having web apps and games. Cloud is almost the way to go forward with the introduction of SkyDrive by Windows and iCloud.by Apple. I believe that by moving towards Cloud base computing, it may have opened up the possibility for other OSes to compete.