Welcome to another great show right here on
ITProTV. You're watching the CompTIA IT
Fundamentals for Exam FC0-U61. If I remembered all of that correctly and what we're gonna dive in today is
gonna be computer operating systems. And here to help us to get a better
understanding on that topic is gonna be Mr. Don Pezet himself. Don, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Ronnie, and I'm
excited to jump into this because in this episode we're gonna be talking
about computer operating systems which are an incredibly important part
of the user experience with computers. When you interact with a laptop or a desktop, you are constantly
interacting with an operating system. And most people don't even
think about it anymore. We think of the applications that we run,
web browsers, and spreadsheets, and so on. And we don't necessarily realize that in
the background there's this operating system that's responsible for darn near
everything that occurs on the computer. It's handling the total
interaction between you and the hardware that you're using. So a pivotal piece of how
a computer functions and it's a part of an IT fundamental
certification, it makes sense that we need to understand how the heart and
soul of our computers work. So in this episode we're gonna take a look
at what makes up an operating system, how they function and do what they do, and
take a look at a couple of the different operating systems that are out there in
the real world to give you an idea of some of the options that are available. Now, Don, when you talk about this idea of user interaction with the computer,
I just go to my computer and I have someone like Cortana on it or
Siri and I just say it and it works, Don. So what do you mean that it
doesn't do what I want it to do? I know, most of us grew up watching Star Trek and you never saw Captain Kirk
break out a keyboard, did you? He just talked to the computer and say put
it on screen or whatever and it happened. Well it sure would be nice if
we could interact with computers with straight language and
that's coming, right? We have Siri and Cortana and
things that are getting closer, they're still pretty crummy though. LAUGH] So most of us though are interacting with a computer in our native language,
right? In English and I might not be able to
say it, I might have to type it but I am doing something in English, right? So for example, let's say that I
wanna browse through a website right, I've got a little diagram for this,
so I want to use a computer and I want to pull up a website. I wanna pull up www.google.com. Well in my mind,
what I'm thinking Is google.com but that's not what the computer is thinking. What the computer is thinking is,
well it's thinking in binary, right? It's an electronic device,
it's using electronic impulses. It's communicating in 1s and 0s. That is very, very different than what
we communicate in as human beings. So how do I tell the computer
I want to go to google.com when the computer doesn't
even understand what that is. Well, the operating system is what's
sitting in between me and the computer. And it's listening. It's listening to the keyboard,
to the mouse, to microphone, whatever it is that I'm using
to communicate with the system. And it's receiving that information, translating it into a wave that
a computer can then understand. Now the operating system is
rarely working by itself. It's normally got other
applications to go along with it. So for example if I'm browsing
the internet, I need a web browser. And maybe I have Google Chrome or
Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Well how does those programs
know to talk to my hardware? Usually they don't, those programs know
how to talk to my operating system and they leave it up to the operating
system to talk to the hardware. When you buy a new computer,
or a laptop, a desktop, a server, the only software that you
normally get is the operating system. And then we start adding applications
on top of it to make it do more, to make it do all the individual
tasks that we want. But that operating system,
that is the core common component that every computer needs to
have in order to function, in order to operate, that's where
the name operating system comes from. Now, operating systems have
evolved a ton over the years. Back in the 1970s when a lot of
this stuff was really developing, operating systems all looked the same. They were command lined interfaces. You pushed power on the computer and
you were greeted with a little prompt and you could then type commands in. Not very user friendly, it was designed
for more sophisticated users and that experience really kind
of held computers back. And then in the early 80s and really throughout the 1980s, we saw
operating systems take a different spin. Now they became graphical. A graphical user interface became very,
very common. And so you end up with modern operating
systems today that when you look at them, looks something like this, right. This is Microsoft Windows 10 which
is the most popular operating system on the planet. So this one's run by most people,
odds are you at home are running this one. It isn't the only operating
system that's out there, right, there's plenty of others. For example, I'm on a laptop and
my laptop is running macOS. That's a different operating system. And it looks like this, right? Again, another graphical user
interface that I can interact with. But there's other operating systems still. Things like GNU Linux. Linux is actually a very old operating
system, older than, well, hang on. [LAUGH] Linux itself actually isn't that old, we'll talk more about it
more in the Linux show. But Linux is built with compatibility
around another operating system called Unix, and Unix is older than the other
operating systems I've mentioned. And Linux looks like this, very, very
similar, this is actually Ubuntu Linux. And when I go into these
operating systems, what I'm really seeing is a way for
me to interact with the computer. I wanna browse the Internet,
how do I that? Well in Linux I've got an icon
from my web browser right here, I click on the icon and
here comes my web browser and I can get out there and
I can browse the Internet. Apparently slowly but
I can do it, there we go. It's now I'm in my web browser and
I can go to www., let me just go to Google,
there's Google's webpage. Back in Mac Os, I say,
I want to browse the internet. Well right down here, I got an icon for
Safari, I fire that up and now it's going to launch Safari and
I can type in www.google. Actually they had a shortcut right
there on the screen, I could've clicked the little variations, but by and
large they're functioning the same way. And lastly, right here on
Microsoft Windows, the same thing. Right? I’ve got an icon for the Microsoft Edge browser
right there on my desktop. I can fire that up. I can browse to Google. These are three very
different operating systems. But they're all giving
me the same ability. They're giving me the ability to launch
an application that I can then use for personal or business user, but
to get a job done, to achieve a task. Remember the computers when they were
originally designed were designed as tools, tools to perform
some kind of work function. Now today's computer is very different,
right? You've got video gaming rigs where people
are doing all sorts of crazy things, and it's not so much about work anymore. So we've seen computers
start to divide up, and now you have not just one
generic type of computer. If it was that way, we'd still have
computers that were the size of houses. But computers are much more purpose built. And operating systems,
can be much more purpose built. So for example, when I'm on a desktop, I expect a nice graphical user interface
where everything's easy to use. But if I'm on a server, for example, a server's a very
different beast altogether. It is built entirely for performance. We're not gonna have graphics like this. We're not gonna have fancy animations and
things. It's gonna be much more streamlined
to get the most performance possible. Operating systems like that are very,
very different. Now each of these operating
systems have evolved a ton over the years from what
they originally were, right? Many of them like Linux especially, right? This one when I look at this Linux
desktop, this is easy to use. It's a graphical user interface. The icons, most of what I want,
are right here. And if they aren't,
I can expand out the app drawer. Now I'll see additional applications, or
I can install applications, and so on. What I've got is there, but in the initial
versions of Linux that came out, and the versions of Unix that came before
it that Linux is an extension of, those didn't look like this. In fact, what they looked like was this
black screen with some text on it, and you can get in there and
you could type command. If you knew the commands,
you could type them. If I said, all right, I wanna see
what files are in this directory. So you could type the is command and
pull up a directory and see these files and folders. If I wanted to change into a directory,
I would do cd and I would type whatever directory it was that I wanted to
get into, and I can pull up that listing. In the olden days, when you pushed power on your computer,
this is the experience you got. It took you to a black screen,
and you could then type on it. In fact, monitors back then were
usually monochrome monitors. They were either green and
black or amber and black. It didn't even deal with color monitors. Why bother with color? It's just text, but
today it's so much more and it shows operating systems have changed,
and we still do have a lot of variations
in our operating systems, though. In a desktop, I expect to have
a ton of applications like this, like a word processor, a web browser. In Mac OS, you have the same thing. You have a word processor, you have
email client, Maps, things like that. In Windows, same thing again. There's a lot of applications here
that are already installed for me that are designed to make an end-user
happy to achieve my needs, right? But, there's also specialized
operating systems, really specialized operating systems, like
the ones that run inside of web cameras. Maybe you have a, shoot,
what's the name of the really expensive webcam? Nest? No, Nest is the thermostat. I think there are Nest cameras. Okay, so the Nest web cameras. Well, those Nest web cameras. Let me just do a quick Bing search,
it might turn something up. [LAUGH] So anyhow, the Nest web cameras,
those web cameras, they're a computer. They're a computer and they've got
a camera on them that takes a picture, but it's not something that is designed for
a human to interact with directly. I can't plug a keyboard and
mouse into this, right? I can't hook a monitor up to it and
see what's on it. Instead, it's running a very
specialized operating system but it's actually functioning
more like a server. A server is designed for
you to interact with it and many people to interact with all remotely, not
actually sitting at the machine itself. When I go to Google.com, their webpage
has been given to me by a server, a computer that's running
a server operating system. It's specifically designed to handout that
webpage versus a workstation operating system where you would use, which
isn't designed for one specific task. It's designed to do whatever
we want it to, all right? Multi-faceted well,
by specializing in a single task, this web camera Can do it much faster,
much more efficiently, and with less hardware which
means it a reduced cost. A laptop might cost me $800,
but this webcam costs $200. They both have RAM. They both have processors. They both have storage. They both have an operating system. But this one is designed
to do just one task, and that brings that cost down significantly. Now when an operating system is
stuck on hardware like this that we can't directly use,
that's called embedded firmware. Embedded firmware is
an operating system that's built right into the circuit
board of this camera. I can't replace it. I can't say I hate that operating system. I'm going to change that out for
something else. It's built into the hardware
of that camera. Versus my laptop, or maybe I look at
it one day, and I say, " You know what, I am sick and tired of Mac OS,
I don't want it on here anymore." I could format my laptop and put Lennox on it,
or Windows for that matter, or whatever. In fact what you see me doing here. I'm running three different operating
systems on my laptop, not just one. So that I can move between them. I'll show and demonstrate this. So that capability,
that's an important thing. And now it's getting even more advanced, where you can do what's
called a hypervisor. Hypervisor is a really fancy type
of operating system It lets you run more than one operating system on
top of a single piece of hardware, which is what I'm doing here. So my laptop is actually running MAC OS. That's the operating system
that's running on here. But I've got the BoonTune Lennox and
I've got Microsoft Windows and they're all running in this virtualized
space, this virtual memory. And, it, not just memory. CPUs, storage, everything. It's virtual. To be able to run these
different operating systems. Those are different ways that
people can run these and it's really rapidly changing industry. Things are advancing so
quickly as operating systems evolve and that functionality expands. And we see more and more user demand. Users are expecting their operating
system to do more today then they ever did before. Now Don, I have another question here, since you started mentioning
the idea of like embedded as well. What about things like mobile phones and smart phones,
do those have operating systems? Or are they, the embedded type where
we're not really interacting with them? So they absolutely have operating systems,
and they count as being embedded. But it really kind of blurring the lines. Modern cellphones are very very
close to regular computers. They have on screen keyboards, humans
interact with them, they have screens, and in fact the Linux operating system
I've brought up more than once here, this Linux desktop right? If you have a google or android phone. The kernel,
the key piece of your operating system on your Android phone is the same as
the one for this Linux desktop right here. So Android phones are effectively running Linux now they're customized pretty
heavily to run on that phone and support wireless networks and all that
other stuff, but it is the same heart. Deep down under the hood it's the same
heart on an Android phone and the Linux operating system. Now if you have an iPhone,
that's not the same. Like here, this is Mac OS. Mac OS is very different from the iOS
that runs on an Apple iPhone or iPad. But those are operating systems as well. They're performing the key functions
of what an operating system does. And what is that key function? Well, it's how we allow a human
to talk to the hardware and get the hardware to do things,
what it is we need it to do. Let me bring it up. We have another diagram somewhere. Let me bring this up here. When we buy a computer, what do we buy? We're buying a collection of hardware. It might be CPU or that's your processor. The processor A lot of people refer to,
you have a desktop computer and you have a tower. A lot of people call that tower the CPU. Well, there's actually a lot
of stuff inside of that tower. The CPU is just one
little chip inside of it. Or in my laptop, there's one little
chip inside of it that is the CPU. The central processing unit. But will refer to the entire computer as
the CPU because the CPU is so important. It's like your brain, the human brain. The brain's really important. You can't function without your brain. But I don't refer to my entire
body as my brain, right? It's an organ stuck in your skull. Well, that CPU in your
computer is the same way. It's doing the thinking. all right. So thinking by itself isn’t enough. It needs other pieces. It needs things like
network interface cards. How do we talk to the network? Do we have WiFi? Do we have physical network
like a cable that we plug in? What do we have? We need cards that let us connect
to those types of networks. How about sound? How do I play sound out so
that people can hear it? Right? I’ve got to have sound circuitry. Disk. How do we remember things? How do we store information
on our computers so that it'll be there the next
time that we come back? And RAM, which is very similar. In fact, we're gonna talk more in
detail about this hardware later on. But just as a quick analogy, disk and RAM, it's like short-term
memory versus long-term memory. Your disk is your long-term memory. It sticks around a long time. And it's not particularly fast, but it
is really good at retaining information. You have a lot of it. RAM is short-term memory. It is very fast, but
you don't have much of it. So you have to use it very efficiently. So those two work together. Well, all of this hardware
has to be handled. We have to communicate with it. When I double-clicked on that
web browser icon, and I said, I wanna launch Microsoft Edge,
double-click on it. I’m telling the operating system,
hey, I want you do something. I want you to launch a web browser so
that I can see it. Now, in the background,
what’s going on is the instruction is sent to the CPU to launch the web browser. It's got to go to disk
to find the web browser. It's got to copy it into RAM where it
actually runs from and get it up and running. And then it's gotta display on the screen. I didn't add display as
an item here of hardware. Display would be another piece. So it's gotta display it on the screen,
and then it's gotta be listening for me to interact like mouse click and
typing on the keyboard and all that. All of that is being managed by this
operating system, but I don't see that. As the user, I don't see the processor. In fact, I didn't even see the disk or
anything. It's there. I can see it if I really want to, if I pull up one of my
property screens here. Then I can come in and it'll tell me,
yeah, I've got an Intel Core i7. I've got 4 gigs of RAM. I can find how much disk space I have. I can see that hardware if I want to. But users don't normally think that way. They think,
I just want to launch a web browser. I don't care about the hardware
behind the scenes. So users think in terms of their software,
spreadsheet, video player, web browser. That's what they think of. They don't think of all
the hardware behind the scenes. Meanwhile, in between is our
friend the operating system. The software is running on top of the OS,
and the OS is talking to the hardware for us
so that we don't have to think about it. It's handling all of that. It knew where to find the web browser. It knew how to get it on screen, and
it knows when I type an address, how to talk to the network card,
to reach out there and get a copy of that web page and then throw
it onto my screen so that I can see it. So that when I go over here and launch
that web browser and I type ITPro.TV. Whoops, and I'd type if it'll let me
ITPro.TV, that it knows to reach out there and grab a copy of that web page and
bring it up on the screen. And I didn't have to know
anything about hardware. I could've just walked up to this
computer for the first time ever, and I'm able to get in here and
function and work. That's really what the operating
systems make possible for us. All right, now, Don, as we start talking about this, you
already talked about the very fact that the operating system helped users to
interact with the hardware itself. You also talked briefly about the idea of
software also needing to interact with it, and the operating system is in between. But what actually allows the operating
system to communicate with the hardware in the way that you're talking about? Right, so the operating system has to know a lot. It has to know about
the hardware underneath. And sometimes that's easy. So, mobile phones, when you talk
about the Android operating system or the iOS operating system
that is found on iPhones. Well, Apple makes the iPhone,
the hardware, and they make iOS, the software, so the iOS knows exactly
what hardware it's going to find. It knows what's there, it's easy. But there's other operating systems like
Microsoft Windows where you can go and buy a copy of Windows by itself, and
then you can load it onto a computer and it has no idea what hardware
it's going to have. So it has to be ready. It has to kind of detect and
learn that hardware, and figure it out. And, to do that, it's dealing with something called
a hardware abstraction layer, or HAL. And a hardware abstraction layer is
basically where the operating system says, look, I don't want the software
to even think about hardware, don't even think about it. The software just needs to know
how to talk to the operating system, and that's it. And then the operating system will
figure out how to talk to the hardware. And the operating system vendors,
they work with the hardware vendors to figure out what hardware is
out there that they can support. The hardware vendors will create
software that's called a driver. And a driver is what lets the operating
system talk to the hardware. It tells it how. It says, hey,
I've got this really fancy printer, and it's got color ink cartridges in it. And it's got four paper drawers so you
can pick from different types of paper. Well, how does the operating
system know that? It doesn't. But the driver, the driver software
that that printer manufacturer creates tells the operating system. And once the operating system knows that,
any software will be able to use it, cuz the software just needs to know
how to talk to the operating system. The operating system is in the middle of
every communication that's happening. It's sitting right there in between
that software and that hardware. And there's actually two
big advantages to this. One, it makes software
development way easier. In the olden days, if we were
filming this video in 1987 or 1988. In fact, some of you might remember
like back in the old WordPerfect days, that if I ran WordPerfect and I wanted
to be able to print to my printer, I had to get a driver for
WordPerfect, for that software, so that it could print to the printer. And then if I closed WordPerfect and I opened up another program,
it wasn't able to print. I would have to get a driver for
that program. Every software had to have drivers for
the hardware. It was a nightmare. And so only a couple of software
applications were really widely supported, and it really just didn't create a very
diverse environment for software. It's not like that anymore. Now, there's 3 main
operating systems out there. There's Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Windows has about an 80%
share in the market, so most people run Microsoft Windows. Mac OS is at about 5%. You have mobile platforms that
are covering another large percentage, and then you have Linux, that's floating
into the 1 or 2% range of market share. So those are really it. Those are the three big ones. I say, big ones, like Linus is actually
a very, very small one in that market. In the server world it's very different,
right? Linux has over 40% of
the server market share. It's very different depending
on what you're doing. But if i'm a vendor I'm
a making a printer or a video card or a headset for listening. I don't need to create drivers for
every program that's out there. There's millions of programs;
I'd never get it done. I just need to create drivers for
those three operating systems. If I create a driver for Windows,
really if I just create it for Windows, I'll have millions and
millions of customers. If I can do Windows and
Mac OS, that helps too. Not a ton, Mac OS is a pretty small
market share, but it still adds on. Linux, we don't really have
an opportunity to generate revenue there, but that doesn't mean
people don't make drivers. You still do see people making drivers for
Linux as well. And that's all they have to do,
three different drivers and they're done. And when somebody writes a program, they
can choose to make that program available for different operating systems, and
now they don't have to worry about all the hardware under the scenes. All right, Don, so can you give me an example of where I
can find some of these different things? Sure, so let's look at both sides. Let's talk about software first. I'll give you an example. I use a text editor called Sublime Text. And if I go to their website,
which is sublimetext.com, you get your standard
kind of marketing site. They'll show you, here's the product,
and you can learn about it, it's great. But if I wanna go and download
the software, when I go to download it, I get choices. And I can see right here,
I can download the one for OS X is the old name for
Mac OS, they've renamed it. This page hasn't been updated apparently,
but I can see Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. Right here, I've got three choices, right? Three primary operating systems,
I pick the one that I'm using. I'm running Mac OS and so I'll download
that version or if I'm running Windows, I'll pick the Windows version. So they're giving me the options. But the authors of Sublime Text, they just
had to create three different versions, and that covered the primary
operating systems. They don't have to worry about hardware, they don't have to worry about
what video card I'm using, right? They just have to worry
about the operating system. Now on the video card side, let's say
that I have a video card from Nvidia. I need my operating system to know how to
send the graphics to that video card so I can see it on my monitor. Well, if I go to Nvidia's website,
I can go to their driver download page and they give me choices as well. And I can see right here if I pull up my,
this is my other computer, I have a A GeForce GTX 1050 card in it. And if I go to download drivers,
you'll see they've got Windows, Linux, and okay, they don't have Mac OS. Nice. So, they don't have an official driver for Mac OS. Now, what does that tell me? I probably can't load
Mac OS on that computer. And that makes sense because
Apple only uses AMD video cards. AMD Radeon cards in their Macs, so they
don't allow Nvidia cards in there as yet. So that's why that was left off. But I actually see some other operating
systems in here like FreeBSD and Solaris, I haven't even talked about those. Those are very, very less
frequently used operating systems. They're very, very specialized,
really, in the compute space. So they've got extra drivers for them. But I can pick the appropriate driver and now my operating system will know
how to talk to that video card. And if my software knows how to
talk to my operating system, now everybody's happy, right? My software knows how to talk to the OS,
OS talks to the hardware, and everything functions
like it's supposed to. That's what the operating
system is facilitating. All right, Don, when we start taking a look at the idea
of the operating systems, are there any other additional functionalities
that the operating system does? So, you've showed us the basic here and
the primary idea, but what other additional
functionalities are we looking at? In the early days, when I say early days I mean even
further back like 1940s and 1950s where people were punching in cables or punching
cards and feeding them into the system. Back then, an operating system simply
dealt with allowing humans to interact with the hardware, making the hardware do
what it needed to do, that was it, right? But a lot of time has passed and more and more functionality has gotten
added to operating systems. Operating systems do so
much more today from power management to crash prevention and troubleshooting, data
logging, permissions and access control. I mean, just any number of things. Network services, acting as a server
because networks didn't even exist in the beginning, so now that's all been
added to be able to act as a server. Software updates,
that's a big part, right? It used to be that if you bought
a computer it was configured a certain way and that's it. It stayed that way until
the computer was dead. Now, we're continually getting updates and these are typically being
fed to the operating system. These are all additional
functions that your OS performs. And as we move to the IT
fundamental series, we'll get a chance to see
a number of those functions. But most of them get specialized
into a particular OS. So here is something that's particular
to Windows or particular to Linux. So, you'll learn more about those, usually
in follow-up certifications like CompTIA and Linux plus, or an A+ and then you'll
get a little more specific there. But in a general sense, operating systems
can really do anything we want them to, and it's continually changing and
expanding. That core functionality what we described
of allowing the software to interact with the hardware and vice versa, that is
always going to be a staple function of that operating system. All right, Don, that sounds like a lot of great
information on just helping us to understand computer operating systems,
but there is a lot more to come. So Don, I gonna give you
a last word on the subject, any last words for our audience? All right, in this episode I tried to stay pretty general,
just here's what an operating system is. In the next couple of episodes, we're gonna take each
operating system individually. And spend a little bit of
time on Microsoft Windows and a little bit of time on Mac OS and
a bit of time on Linux, just to give you guys some exposure
to what those operating systems are. For the IT fundamentals exam, they don't
expect you to be fluent in the operating systems, but
you do need to be familiar with them. You need to understand what
the basic functions are. And in real life land,
when you get out there and you're working in an ITrelated job,
you'll find yourself being exposed to all of these operating
systems on a regular basis. So it is a good idea to be familiar
with them, we're gonna tackle each of them in the coming episodes. All right, Don, thank you again for helping us out and thank you also for
joining us right here. Signing off for ITPro.TV, I'm your host Ronnie Wong. And I'm Don Pezet. Stay tuned right here for more of the CompTIA IT Fundamentals
episodes coming your way. [MUSIC] Thank you for watching ITPRO.TV.
