Operating Systems - An Overview

We know that human beings cannot directly interact with the hardware of a computer. The best thing to do is to use an interface that can interact with the hardware of the computer and can understand the user and the kind of work he wants to perform. So the interface is the Operating System.

The OS is selected according to our needs and utilization. In the present day there are majorly two major Flavors of Operating systems that are being used. One of them is the Microsoft Flavor and the Unix Flavor. There have been many advances in both of these flavors of operating systems.

The Microsoft family has both for personal use and commercial use. The personal flavor has home edition, professional edition and the ultimate editions. The commercial flavors have made advancements in the Networking field. These days companies are using the Microsoft family for their commercial needs.

Another OS that is being used is from the Unix Family. There are many flavors of unix that are being developed and used for various commercial and personal use. Unix is a freeware with open source code. Many companies are trying to make changes to the free source code operating system according to their commercial needs or personal needs and are taking propriety of the operating system.

The use has been for personal and commercial needs. The personal versions of the Unix os is obtained for free in the internet. The commercial operating systems are being used for commercial needs only, to manage their business needs and applications.

The most widely used unix flavor for personal use is Ubuntu. It can be downloaded from their website. For commercial use the mostly used unix flavors are Oracle Solaris (Oracle acquired Sun recently) and can be found at Oracle website, IBM AIX supported by IBM and HP-UX.

Information for their products can be found at their respective websites.

The Unix flavor has had an advancement in the flavor called LINUX. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the most widely used commercial os. So in short these are the most widely used os used for commercial and personal use.