OPERATING SYSTEM AS A USER INTERFACE

As you all know we all have some or the other operating system in our PC or laptops..now one question to all of you have you ever thought of any reasons why we use the operating system....????
the answer is to get a good and easy interface with computer hardware...this is the case with the layman...but what with the people who develop application programs...for them the operating system provides the utilities which the programmers use in their programs....Hence the Hierarchy goes like this....:-
1.APPLICATION PROGRAMS
2.UTILITIES
3.OPERATING SYSTEM
4.COMPUTER HARDWARE
Now talking about the application programs these are the programs which the user uses to access the computer's utilities.for example,if you want to copy a file from one location and paste it somewhere else then he just right click on the file and use the utility 'copy' .This is the function provided by the operating system.Now many of us use Microsoft office,this is also an ap[plication program which uses the utilities of the Windows operating system.

The second layer is of utilities,as we have seen the example of 'copy',we can very well understand the concept of the utilities.The utilities are nothing but system programs which make the work of application programmers easy.These system programs implement frquently used functions that assist in program creation,the management of files,and the control of I/O devices.

The third layer is of the operating system,the operating system itself hides the computer hardware from the programmer.It acts as the interface layer between the programmer and the computer hardware.for example,there is one program developed by the programmer which makes use of the hardware interrupts.now the programmer here wants to access the hardware via the program,here the operating system will process the request for the hardware.modern day operating systems handle the interrupts by their kernel.when the running program makes the hardware interrupt the control gets transferred to the operating system's kernel,there the request is processed or the control is transferred to the device driver.

The fourth layer is of the computer hardware,this you all know the basic part of the computer keyboard,joystick,visual display unit,printer etc.these devices can be accessed easily via operating system.
Hence the operating system acts as the user interface.it accepts the user request ,process it and gives the output in the language which the user understands.