This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.
What is an Operating System?
An operating system is software that provides services to the programs (or tools/applications) that we use to do things on a computer. For instance, modern operating systems provide printing services that allow any program running on the computer to print on the connected printers. The programs themselves don't have to have much programming related to specific printers. They can rely on the operating system's printer-specific programming to handle the messy details of producing printed output. Other services that the operating system provides are: Access to storage devices and networks, communication with input devices and the display and many "low-level" services such as keeping track of the date and time.
A looser definition of an operating System is the interface software between man and machine that translates human input into machine language, and responses/actions from the machine as output understandable to humans.
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