What does your OS do for you?

FSCDiablo

FSCDiablo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 3, 2003
Messages
390
This idea has been burning in my brain lately. What does your OS do for YOU? For me, an OS's main job is to launch apps. I look at MS and I wonder what what does my latest version do that every other version has done since windows 95? I'm sadly not seeing much differnece.

Assisde from being a little slicker at it, mostly each iteration of my OS hs been built to fix the problems the last version introduced. That is such a sad musing. Has Win 98, ME, 2000, XP done little more than fix all the problems the prior version has introduced since the previous version? What else does my OS really do for me now that it did not do in 1995? Networking? Printing? App launching? Internet browsing? Email? GUI? PnP? mmmmmmmmmmmmmm 4 OS upgrades and some $500 or more later and I've gottem what new improvements in my OS since 1995?

What does your OS do for you?
 
it manages my networking, graphics, filesystem, etc...

if you think OS's haven't made big jumps in areas other than appearance/bug fixes, you're fooling yourself
 
FSCDiablo said:
This idea has been burning in my brain lately. What does your OS do for YOU? For me, an OS's main job is to launch apps. I look at MS and I wonder what what does my latest version do that every other version has done since windows 95? I'm sadly not seeing much differnece.

Assisde from being a little slicker at it, mostly each iteration of my OS hs been built to fix the problems the last version introduced. That is such a sad musing. Has Win 98, ME, 2000, XP done little more than fix all the problems the prior version has introduced since the previous version? What else does my OS really do for me now that it did not do in 1995? Networking? Printing? App launching? Internet browsing? Email? GUI? PnP? mmmmmmmmmmmmmm 4 OS upgrades and some $500 or more later and I've gottem what new improvements in my OS since 1995?

What does your OS do for you?
Click to expand...

All an OS dose is run and launch applications. You should be asking what improvements in my OS take advantage of Hardware and Software technolies that older OSs don't.
 
It integrated multi-processing, 3d video,speed improvements, memory management, a clock that updates time by itself, security features, more intuitive organization, user accounts, automatic updates, and overall speed improvements. And yes, it did fix a lot of problems, but what do you think progress is?
 
it does a lot of things:

launch and monitor applications
facilitate resource management
allow me to multi-thread and multi-task
provides standardized access to HW resources to programmers.
 
Not only that but take into consideration the fact that your OS allows you to go to the store, buy the latest and greatest hardware add-on periphial, plug it in, probably install some drivers provided when you bought it and blamo, you're good to go.

Remember DOS/3.1/95/NT/98/ME and how difficult some of this was? The complexity of the OS is far more advanced as is the hardware but the ability of the OS to interface with it is FAR better than it used to be. On the larger majority it is far easier to just "plug and play" then it was back when '95 introduced that theory. Today it's true.

Not only that but the way we interface with XP today is a far more pleasant experience than it used to be back in those old OS days.
 
serbiaNem said:
Ia clock that updates time by itself
Click to expand...

:D
Kinda reminded me of Ralphie talking about his Red Ryder BB gun.

Someone remind me not to post after a few cocktails. :eek: My OP wasn't as coherent as I woulda have liked it to have been. I think I'm just getting older and more jadded I suppose. I look back over 20+ years of computing fun and sometimes try to take a look at the forest through the tees and see where it's at and where it is headed.

My OP was really too broad and vague, I should try to narrow my ramblings down to someting more concise in the future. My poor brain is just trying to paint a picture of Win95 overlayed wiht WinXP and see changes outside of what could be considered bugfixes, plugging security holes, and minor improvments on original concepts (e.g. PnP). Wish I had kep around some of my old CDs and could give the old ones, like NT4, a whirl again.

I do appreciate hearring your views however, even if ya toss some :rolleyes: at me.
 
What does my OS do for me?

Hmmm, lately, it waits till I am heavily involved in something time sensitive on the computer, or in the middle of an important conversation, then hangs on me forcing a reboot.

Other than that, it likes to mysteriously drop my network connection every few days requiring a reboot to get it back, occassionally crash upon loading the desktop, introduce a random popping/hiss into the sound stream, and if I'm really lucky decide that some annoying file on my desktop just can't be deleted for any reason.

Then again, for all that, it is still a lot more stable than my Win95 machine was... XpPro was a lot better two years ago when I first installed it, I probably just need to back up the media files and redo everything else.
 
After having used a few different OSes for all sorts of things the last years, I'll have to agree that "run programs" really is all there is to it in daily use.
Assuming that all hardware is supported, Win95 isn't much different from XP, FreeBSD or Linux when you are done setting it up. You boot, log in, press a few buttons, and start very similar (or identical) programs, and the interaction with the OS itself is minimal. [1]

Of course, they are quite different when you are setting them up (drivers and updates are handled differently, as are programs, etc), but how often do you do that?
The only case where there is a real difference in daily use is PnP support for USB and FireWire devices, and even those can be set up to work more or less the same on most OSes. (I've used an USB thumbdrive on NT4 just fine, but support is lacking. Same for Win95.)

Stability is ... hard to judge. Ideally, there shouldn't be a difference, sometimes there isn't (some people run WinME with no problems, suprisingly), but it's one of the areas where there has been progress.

The best I can say about XP is that it is what they said Win95 would be. [2] It's nothing new, but a very decent implementation of the same concepts, possibly the best so far. I think it says something that the most noteworthy new idea IMO is the automatic updates.

[1] During long nights, I've managed to forget what OS I'm using more than once. Firefox is much the same everywhere, and I prefer unobtrusive themes.
[2] Given the average PR campaign, that isn't a bad feat.
 
What does my OS do for me?

Allows me to do bitch-hard calculations in a few minuits.
 
eeyrjmr said:
What does my OS do for me?
Allows me to do bitch-hard calculations in a few minuits.
Click to expand...

I'm not entirely sure if the software on scientific calculators qualifies as OSes. ;)
 
HHunt said:
I'm not entirely sure if the software on scientific calculators qualifies as OSes. ;)
Click to expand...


Ha,

Actually it was Matlab on Linux/Unix/Windows
The only software on my Scientif calculator is Pontoon
 
eeyrjmr said:
Ha,

Actually it was Matlab on Linux/Unix/Windows
The only software on my Scientif calculator is Pontoon
Click to expand...

You just kind of proved that it's the software and not the OS that's important, btw. :)
 
HHunt said:
You just kind of proved that it's the software and not the OS that's important, btw. :)
Click to expand...

Ahhh, I see yr point, But it is the OS that allows a more user-friendly access to the CPU
 
eeyrjmr said:
Ahhh, I see yr point, But it is the OS that allows a more user-friendly access to the CPU
Click to expand...

Having an OS makes it much easier to write and use programs, yeah.
 
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