What is an Operating System?

At it's very core, and at a very high-level, an Operating System is the software which allows you to run programs on hardware.

The Operating System has a 'kernel' which is software that directly interfaces with the hardware and tells it what to do. The kernel uses things called 'drivers' which tells the kernel how to talk to that specific bit of hardware (Think a Hard Drive).

The OS handles starting up and shutting down programs, permissions, accounts, (some) security and so on.

Before Operating Systems, computers were purpose built to do one task. Adding Operating Systems allowed computers to become more multi-purpose.

What Next?

Learn about the Operating System we run on our servers.