A Report on Operating Systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

A Report on Operating Systems - Essay Example The 'ENIAC' had the capacity to do 100,000 calculations per second (White, 2005). As the needs increased, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated, special-purpose analog computers during the 20th century, which used a direct physical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these features became more and more uncommon after the introduction digital computer. A succession of steadily more potent and versatile computers were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s, with increasing use of digital electronics (invented by Claude Shannon in 1937) and more versatile programmability (Computer, 2006). Later, Intel released the world's first commercial microprocessor, the 4004 on November 15th, 1971. This is a Fourth generation computer using a microprocessor to locate much of the computer's processing abilities on a single (small) chip. The microprocessor allowed the development of microcomputers, personal computers that were small and cheap enough to be affordable by ordinary people. The first such personal computer was the MITS Altair 8800, released at the end of 1974, but it was followed by computers such as the Apple I & II, Commodore PET and eventually the original IBM PC in 1981. Although processing power and storage capacities have increased beyond all recognition since the 1970s the underlying technology of LSI (large scale integration) or VLSI (very large scale integration) microchips has remained basically the same, so it is widely regarded that most of today's computers still belong to the fourth generation (White, 2005).The demands of today's computer users as well as the modern network have moved beyond that of simple client server connectivity. There is now the availability of a wide variety of end-to-end communication products aimed at specific business functions. These include access points, broadband, cable, content networking, contact centre solutions, data centre networking, network management, optical, routing, security, VPN, storage networking, switching, unified communications, video, voice and wireless (Networking, 2004). Today's computers also have huge speed and capacity for information processing compared to computers of the past, and they have become exponentially more powerful over the years (a phenomenon known as Moore's Law). The original computers were as huge as the size of a big room. Today's smaller computers for individual use, called personal computers, and their portable equivalent, the notebook computer, are ubiquitous information-processing and communication tools and are perhaps what most non-experts think of as "a co mputer". However, the most common form of computer in use today is the embedded computer, small computers used to control another device. Embedded computers control machines from fighter planes to digital cameras (Computer, 2006). Historical developments in operating systemsSoon after the invention of the computer, it was discovered that certain tasks were required in many different programs; an early example was computing some of the standard mathematical functions. For the purposes of efficiency, standard versions of these were collected in libraries and made