The computer industry has come along way over the last fifty years. Technological advancements have brought us to a Personal Computer (PC) in almost every home. This giant leap could not have been possible if not for operating systems (OS) that the common person could use and understand. This paper will describe and illustrate several operating systems in use today. Also this paper will compare and contrast some of the features and benefits of these operating systems.
Windows 98.
In June 1998, Microsoft released their next version of The Windows family of operating systems (OS). This OS was dubbed Windows 98. It had many improvements to its predecessor, Windows 95, but the prime improvement was the integration of the web browser into the Operating System. The desktop becomes a web page, able to receive updates from the Internet. .
Additional improvements are:.
Communications facilities are more closely integrated with the operating system and users can access web documents in just the same way as files on a local disk. .
Speed improvements include faster start up and shut down of the operating system itself, and faster launching and closing of applications. .
Windows 98 also supports: .
FAT32 . The improved File Allocation Table uses 32-bit addressing (instead of 16-bit) allowing it to make more efficient use of disk space and have much larger disk partitions. .
USB . Universal Serial Bus, for easy connection to hardware devices. .
IEEE 1394 . A High Performance Serial Bus to transport high bandwidth data between computers and electronic products, such as digital camcorders, and VCRs. .
MMX . Takes advantage of the Multimedia Extension (MMX) instructions for improved multimedia .
DVD . Digital Versatile Disk for full motion video and other multimedia and over 28 times the capacity of a CD-ROM . .
ACPI. Conserves energy on computers that support ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface).