What is a operating system

The computer system is a collection of different hardware components. So we need software that could perform the basic tasks such as recognizing input from the input devices, sending output to the output devices, keeping tracks of files and directories on the disk and control computer peripheral devices like mouse, printer, scanners etc. An OS is a collection of system program that controls the operations of the computer system. It activates and recognizes the hardware devices and provides the operating environment for other application software. It acts as the intermediary between a user and the computer hardware. It has major two objectives, first is to activate the hardware devices and other is to provide an interactive interface to the user and interpret commands so that it can communicate with the hardware. Example UNIX, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Linux etc.