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Most Personal Computers run under the MSDOS Operating System.
MSDOS being the Microsoft Disk Operating System.
It is estimated that almost 10 million machines run under the MSDOS
Operating System and some 20,000 or more end-user applications
have been published to run with it. |
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| The Operating System is the
program which provides organized services to the computer user and the
application programs that they wish to use. |
| These services consist mainly of access to the hardware resources
such as the disk drives, keyboard, etc. |
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| The Operating System has three main constituents:- |
| 1. The system files which are hidden. Their function is to perform
such basic tasks as reading the keyboard, displaying characters
on the screen, opening and closing files etc. |
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| 2. The command interrupter, COMMAND.COM which reads commands
typed at the keyboard and attempts to obey them. COMMAND.COM has
some simple commands built in - these are known as internal commands. |
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| 3. A series of utility programs covering functions not handled
by the internal commands. There are approximately 52 of these
commands; the exact number varies between different versions of
MSDOS, ranging from COPY to copy files to EDIT the text editor, and many more. |
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| Therefore, the Operating systems provide a software platform
on top of which other programs, called application programs, can run. |
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