Summary

An operating system is a program designed to run other programs on a computer and it is the most important program. It manages the hardware and software resources of the system and It provides a stable, consistent way for applications to deal with the hardware without having to know all the details of the hardware. Within the family of operating systems, we can categorize them into four types: Real-time operating system (RTOS), Single-user, single task, Single-user, multi-tasking and Multi-user. Utility programs help manage, maintain and control computer resources. Operating systems provide utilities to administer, troubleshoot, and context sensitive help to use the tools.

A device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs (an application) to interact with a hardware device. Programmers use different programming languages to write their applications. In order to convert their program codes from a high level language to machine language, we need to use a language translator.