OS in Commercial Computers

Commercial usage of computers

The commercial usage of computers brought new requirements, one of which is executing programs one after another without any delays. Otherwise, why spend the money on it?

New commercial requirements needed new solutions. The most time-consuming task was to switch between programs. Therefore, engineers of General Motors and North American Aviation came up with an idea to automate this. They created the first commercial operating system, GM-NAA I/O. The primary goal of the system was to manage the execution of programs.

The heavy load of computers and the variety of their programs brought another new task. When the computer loads a program, the program defines the hardware’s available features. For example, we can only use a program if it includes a code to control an output device. Otherwise, the device is unavailable.

Let’s suppose that we are an organization. We use a particular computer model all the time, and its hardware always stays the same. Therefore, we do not change the code that controls our hardware. We just copy the code from one program to another, and it takes extra effort.

Copying hardware-specific code gave engineers the idea of a special service program. The service program loads together with the user’s application and provides hardware support. Soon, these service programs became part of the first-generation operating systems.

Why the OS is required?

Now, it is time to come back to the question: Why do we need an OS? We found out that applications could work without them, in general. In fact, such applications are still in use today. For example, utilities for memory checks and disk partitioning, antiviruses, and recovery tools.

The applications that work without an OS are called bare-metal software. Developing such software takes a lot of time and effort. The software should include the code to support all the required hardware.

However, the OS usually provides the code for the supporting hardware. Why would we not use it? Most modern developers choose to because it reduces the amount of work and speeds up the release of the applications.

However, a modern OS is a vastly complex system. It provides a lot more features than just hardware support.