for some it's about brand loyalty for
some it's about aspirations that are marketed and advertised different ways
but but let me try to answer it as a kind of technical question question of a little bit
more as a technical question so some of this comes down to
the ways in which we think about computer systems so generally if you think about it
this way you have what we would call the hardware then on top of this we have a
special set of programs called the operating system and on top of the
operating system you will have what's called applications, yeah? now all of those also have what, broadly speaking, is a windowing system so this is the ways in which they present
themselves to you this would be you, you would interact
with a window, say, and that window would interact with what processing
applications say that what process an application would ask that the
underlying operating system to do certain things like opening a file and that
opening a file would make certain things happen on the hardware. so there's quite a
long history of different operating systems, from the very first inception
you would have different operating systems which would run in different
manufacturers equipment so IBM would have one Honeyware would have another ICL
would have another and all of those different systems would each have their own
operating systems so the BBC micro had one, the Commodore
64 had another and all of those would come and go so they'd be closely kind of
tied to the hardware. historically what's happened is that they'd also, each of
those manufacturers, would offer a different way of presenting the computer
so they have different windowing systems so originally did they would simply be
commanding, you type out a command line and something would happen but macs and pcs have been two of the
main competitors, at one point through the early eighties the big
diference that people would speak about would be the windowing system difference.
one was graphical one had a desktop made for it, the other didn't. with the advent of
that sort of facility on Windows machines that difference is less clear so a windows 8 machine and a Macintosh
interface uses icons many recognise in in similar ways but you still will have a religious
separation between people about both each to each say but only in slightly
different ways so today I think the real difference
between them is that Apple still own and build the hardware that they put their
operating system on so they exist both is a software company and a hardware
company and it's only recently that Microsoft have even attempted to do that
again so the microsoft surface is the first
time Microsoft have thought to do this why is that important? Well, it's
important because what the operating system has to do is translate the
applications needs into things for the computer, the hardware, to do and if
you've built that hardware you know how the hardware works, you can
optimize in particular ways. if you don't then you can't necessarily do that
quite as smoothly and quite as efficiently. So detecting things
happening in the hardware is more difficult if you haven't built it because
you're relying on other people building things. so that's why the operating systems in Macintoshes can actually make presumptions about the hardware and
it's use and therefore build an optimized and can test it so they've actually tested their systems
with the actual hardware that they run on Microsoft have a different
orientation their operating systems are installed in many manufacturers' hardware and so they can't really test it on every single possible machine, so that means that not
as optimal at that point or smooth at that point and they're relying on what's
called device drivers being specifically installed for each device so that would
translate the operating system commands specifics of that hardware. that's why
often you see when you're using a pc machine or Microsoft machine you will
see our own need to reinstall and update and change different drivers, mostly those are invisible in the Macintosh
because they're pretty much owned by apple and installed by Apple and updated
by Apple. the plus side of this is that it feels nice and and more efficient the downside of this is you've only got
one machine that it runs on and therefore you've got a concealed unit which means
that Macintosh machines are often accused of being more expensive
because on windows, on windows type devices, you can run it on a range of hardware
from high to low end and you can optimize the place of the hardware down
by running on that where as you don't have that range of
hardware in quite the same way. i've used Macintosh's and Microsoft as the kind of
classic divisions that people use, but if you actually go through the the range of
others this separation down into different systems also applies so in terms of Linux, Linux roots are
from original open source unix people of taking the converging unix
platform and ported and made it work on a pc environment and set
pc environments and so that operating system is capable of running across a
wide range of hardware. and also there is a number of windowing systems that it
itself supports now the advantage with Linux environments is that Linux environments
are open so no corporation or company owns them
quite the same way they're open source and modifiable by
people, and people can moderate them and use them so its championed as one
of the classic, it's championed one of the biggest forces for
keeping the internet and computer systems open and accessible to all floating-point looks at one tenth plus two tenth,
what you just typed in, 0.1 plus 0.2 in decimal, and it says that one tenth plus two tenth
does not quite equal three tenths because, to its mind, it doesn't.
