We are talking computers in management. We talked evaluation of computers and computer softwares in our previous talk. We talked about operating system in our last post, today we continue with that. We talked the drawback of idling the CPU was overcome with the introduction of overlapped processing.
For example why not take up input operation of job 2 and the output operation of job 1 simultaneously? This and similar considerations gave rise to the concept of multi-programming. A multi-programming operating system handles multiple jobs simultaneously by overlapping the input, output and processing cycles of various jobs.
This operating system was introduced along with third generation computers and is still very popular. It has replaced the earlier batch processing (serial) operating system. With multi-programming a CPU’s utilization is increased and hence jobs get executed faster on an average. However a multi-programming operating system is more complex hardware to support it.
Other types of operating systems which are popular today are multi-processing operating systems and real time operating systems. A multi-processing operating system uses multiple CPU’s to process multiple jobs. A real time operating system is a very different type of operating system, because it is used for different type of applications, i.e., real time applications such as airlines reservations, process control, etc.
Utilities
Utility programmes are those which are very often requested by many application programmes. mailing leads and marketing list are few example of such utility programmes which are used in large by industry. A few examples are:
SORT/MERGE for sorting large volumes of data and merging them into a single sort list like mortgage mailing list.
Transfer programmes for transforming contents from one medium to another, e.g., disk to tape, tape to disk, etc.
Computers in Management 