What is an Operating System?

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ChrisGreaves
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What is an Operating System?

Post by ChrisGreaves »

This question came up yesterday on the drive to the canoeing spot. I told Fred that I was reviewing an AluraTek Libre/Touch (May 27th) with an Android operating system and that I supposed I'd have to learn how to explore and install "Android aps" on the device.

When I was your age ... an operating system had three main purposes:
(1) Manage the filestore - the "filing cabinets of data" as we saw them.
(2) Manage input/output devices, specifically card readers/punches, line printers, tapes and disks
(3) Schedule jobs and schedule processes for those jobs.

Input and Output was well-defined; it was the boxes of punched cards, the cartons of continuous-form line printer paper and reels of tape that sat in your room, and which you carried back-and-forth to the computer system.

Along came the PC ...
The filestore still gets managed - it is floppy disk drives, floppy disks with directories, hard drives and external drives, memory keys.
The scheduling now is not so much end-user job-related as much as sub-tasks of the various applications being run, and background processors (such as anti-malware and file indexing suites)

The PC input-output defeats me; we have the keyboard and screen (used to be an IBM typewriter console, but still ...).
We have laser and ink printers, maybe a dot-matrix for carbon-copy stuff such as waybill printing.

But the Android Operating System?

Books are downloaded, (and photos uploaded from your phone) wirelessly through the air.
Input is restricted to an onscreen keyboard, and seems to me to be more like a RunJob command, rather than, say payroll data. that is, it is more a directive "Add a typed-in bookmark" than data destined to be processed into information.
Output is ephemeral (can I say that?) and exists on the eReader screen only until I swipe to the next page with my finger-tip.
File management is crude; one can delete a file and rename a file, but perhaps it is early days yet.

I would be more inclined to call it a Device Controller than bless it with the title "Operating System".

(signed) "Diehard punched-card fan" of Toronto.
An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace

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stuckling1
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Re: What is an Operating System?

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Android was of course originally developed for smart-phones - subsequently it has diversifed to tablets, ereader, etc.

A smartphone has memory, storage, & needs to be able to manage this.
It's inputs often include keys aswell as a touch panel, you use them to enter text, phone numbers etc
The output is the data on screen/audio you hear.
Android is able to perform processing tasks, running apps or whatever.

Fully feldged Android (Gingerbread, Honeycomb or Icecream) is able to do all this and more - I think it deserves to qualify as an OS?
Your reader/tablet has a much more limited featureset, so the OS-sy characteristics of Android aren't as obvious. Android is probably over-qualified for running such a simple set of features, but isn't it cheaper & easier for a manufacturer to tweak a stripped down Android OS suitable for everything than to develop a bespoke device controller for that product?

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stuckling1
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Re: What is an Operating System?

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stuckling1 wrote:Gingerbread, Honeycomb or Icecream)

Why do Google give their products such tasty names? I'm hungry now! :grin:

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stuck
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Re: What is an Operating System?

Post by stuck »

err, aren't you always hungry?

anyway, that's no excuse, didn't you & stuckling2 meet up with the toast fairy while your mother and I were out?

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ChrisGreaves
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Re: What is an Operating System?

Post by ChrisGreaves »

stuckling1 wrote:.. memory, storage .. .. touch panel .... screen/audio .. Fully fledged .. deserves to qualify as an OS?
Agreed with all of that, but please forgive me for pulling the "age" card here. Form my (sagging) memory we had 8MB (!) disk drives, ganged in sets of 4 or 8 that were controlled by what today we might call a microprocessor, although it wasn't. The drives were the size of a washing machine, and the controller ditto. The controller was dedicated to multiplexing(?) streams of data to and from the disk drives, so a very specific task.
It could compute in the sense that it could add/subtract etc., but we couldn't have classified it as (in those days) as a general-purpose computer (payroll, library circulation etc.)

It seems to me that the manifestation of Android in the AluraTek eReader (my only exposure to date) has the ability of a disk controller.
Hence my leaning towards "device controllers" rather than "computer".

I think the closest thing to a 1960s device controller that people would recognize nowadays is a card that slots into a desktop PC, like a sound card, or a modem, or maybe a fax card.

isn't it cheaper & easier for a manufacturer to tweak a stripped down Android OS suitable for everything than to develop a bespoke device controller for that product?
Oh Absolutely! If we can write a program/build a device that can then be sold off as components I'm all for it.
I believe that's what I've done in developing libraries of VBA code; I implement/use just the bits I need, and it's cheaper than rewriting the entire set of code for each application.

Ignore your parent; I see him chiming in. Older people don't know everything (grin!)
I know that I don't ...
An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace