Section 3 - What is an Operating System

The operating system is an application that manages other applications and devices. The diagram below depicts an operating system managing a printer, a mouse, an application, a disk drive, a monitor and a keyboard.

The operating system translates the computer language (remember all those 0's and 1's) into information. One method of presenting this information is via a graphical user interface (GUI). Elements of a GUI include such things as windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, icons, the taskbar and the desktop.

The desktop is the primary GUI generated by the Windows operating systems, and you will learn about the Desktop in the next section.