The UNIX operating system was developed in the 60’s and 70’s by a group of AT & T employees at Bell Labs. Unix is used by both servers and workstations and is the basis for a wide variety of other operating systems.
The operating system under UNIX consists of many of the utilities listed above along with the master control program which is called the “kernel”.
The kernel helps start and stop programs, handle the file system, take care of other common high level tasks that most programs share and schedule access to hardware to avoid conflicts if two programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously.
Besides the main kernel, UNIX systems also had micro-kernels which tried to reverse the growing size of kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. Read the rest of this entry →
In 1984, Apple Computer introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer. The first version was the Macintosh 128K model which came bundled with the Mac OS operating system then known as the “System Software”.
The Mac is often credited with popularizing the graphical user interface (GUI).
The Mac OS has been pre-installed on almost every Macintosh computer ever sold. The operating system is also sold separately from the computer just as with Microsoft Windows.
The original Mac OS was heavily based on the Lisa OS previously released by Apple for the Lisa computer in 1983. It also used concepts from other operating systems previewed by Apple executives.
In 1984, Apple partnered with Microsoft in an agreement that would have Microsoft creating versions of Word and Excel for the Mac OS. Read the rest of this entry →
Back in the late 1970’s, two enterprising young computer programmers named Paul Allen and Bill Gates developed an adaptation for the BASIC computer language that would help run newly created personal computer just coming on the technology market.
As with any technology, their original creation changed and grew.
The two friends decided they had the product and the capability to become successful, so they formed a company now known as Microsoft.
Over the years, Microsoft has grown to a giant in the computer industry with successes never before seen by a “from scratch” endeavor.
Microsoft was responsible for the development of not only several computer languages like COBOL and PASCAL, but also for the development of the earliest operating system MS-DOS.
In partnership with IBM, who was just introducing the personal computer to the individual consumer, all of the IBM computers used MS-DOS on their systems. The year was 1981.
Windows 3.1 was the first product to fully utilize graphical user interface for ease of controlling what the computer would do. Read the rest of this entry →
The very first thing that would catch your attention when you are looking at Logitech G15 gaming keyboard is the big LCD display at the keyboard’s back.
There is a group of multimedia buttons just below the LCD to control your media player and sound volume. These are considered some of the standard selection of multimedia buttons.
The LCD itself displays info like calculator or as a thermometer. It will also turn itself into a LCD countdown timer like a stop watch or act as the display of an MP3 player.
The LCD POP3 shows the mailbox status, and the LCD Clocks shows clock, calendar or number of unread mails.
It can also be set to show CPU load and memory usage. Plugins can be installed to make the LCD function like a chat box.
If you don’t want to use the screen, you can just pull it down and it will fit into the keyboard nicely.
There is a button on the left that could disable the Windows-related buttons like the Windows buttons and the Context Menu button.
There are also 2 USB ports on the keyboard suitable for joysticks, mice, or a webcam.
There are 18 multimedia buttons on the left, numbered G1 to G18. The keys glow with a mild blue light once the keyboard is connected.
Most users think that the keyboard is nice to type with and only need minimal time to adjust to. The keyboard also processes correctly when you press several buttons at the same time.
The highlighting feature in the keyboard is a bit different compared to the others. Most of today’s highlighted keyboard uses see through material for their buttons.
But in Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard, the lights only highlight the alphabets on the keyboard. The symbols will be more visible in the dark.
The Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router makes setting up a home or office network much easier.
It comes together with the documents needed in order to install it well. However, some users complained that the web interface is difficult to navigate, instructions are hard to understand and the security setup should be explained better for novices.
Drop link has also been observed. Some offshore users also complained about the lack of offshore services.
The Fast Start guide will try its best to illustrate the setup process. Judging by the comments of several users, it is better to have basic networking knowledge in order to use this router.
The Linksys WRT54GS has a web-based configuration tool that gives you the access to other networking settings like the DHCP server and client settings. Read the rest of this entry →
The World Wide Web is just wonderful isn’t it? With it, information is able to travel fast and wide.
This statement proves to be true when some photos alleged to be depicting HTC’s yet-to-be-launched 2009 products.
Internet users have immediately lap up the news and give some creative inputs of their own – one of the most popular rumours surrounding the photos is that one of the phones depicted are going to be run on Google’s mobile operating system (OS) – Android.
If the rumour is true, we have strong reasons to believe that the phone, originally named HTC Sapphire will be marketed in the US as the T-Mobile G2. Read the rest of this entry →
Be prepared, Apple and T-Mobile, for Palm is trying to gatecrash the smartphone market segment party, so firmly dominated firstly by iPhone and then T-Mobile G1 in the year 2008.
Its weapons? The touchscreen Pre and a brand-new platform with has the name WebOS.
Allow us to postpone the rest of the article by stating that we seriously think there has been some serious mix-up in the naming of the new OS of smartphones nowadays.
I mean, shouldn’t Google’s OS be named WebOS while Palm’s be named Android? That would be cool, wouldn’t it?
Back to our story, Pre. It has a large 3.1-inch 480×320 touch screen complete with multitouch and accelerometer support.
The gadget weighs 4.8 ounces, has a slide-out curved keypad. As the name of the platform suggests, it also integrates the now compulsory Wi-Fi and 3G features. Read the rest of this entry →
Lenovo has not been a conventional and predictable company, has it? It has maintained a line of notebooks, that although are certified to be tough and hardy, lacked the aesthetic features chased and often improved on by the majority of laptop manufacturers.
Likewise, in a most controversial move announced just before the year 2008 ended, Lenovo will be launching a new mobile workstation that has two screens, the first ever.
Not only that, the unit will be supplied with powerful quad-core processor and graphics card to fully maximize the potential of the screens.
As surprising as those features may seem, the weight and size of the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds and its expected price are not exactly normal either. Read the rest of this entry →
As a user, you normally interact with the operating system through a set of commands. For example, the DOS operating system contains commands such as COPY and RENAME for copying files and changing the names of files, respectively.
The commands are accepted and executed by a part of the operating system called the command processor or command line interpreter.
Graphical user interfaces allow you to enter commands by pointing and clicking at objects that appear on the screen.
But that really doesn’t address the various ways that operating systems make your computer work easier and more efficiently.
Their specific capacities are what make them help your computer operate as a user-friendly device. Let’s look specifically at what an operating system does. Read the rest of this entry →
The earliest of computers didn’t have an operating system. By the early 1960’s, commercial computer vendors were supplying quite extensive tools for streamlining the development, scheduling and execution of jobs on batch processing systems.
Through the 1960’s, several concepts were developed which drove the development of operating systems.
The IBM System 360 produced a family of mainframe computer that served consumers with differing capacities and prices.
A single operating system was planned for these computers rather than developing generic programs for every individual model. Read the rest of this entry →
