viewers may recognize operating systems as the squared rainbow or fruit themed
logo that they stare at whenever they caress the love button of their desk and
or laptop but the big and often ignored question beyond what makes us partial to
our own particular brand of software is what the sam heck do these systems of
operation actually do let's start at the beginning before the
half-eaten fruit or surprisingly opaque window makes its appearance when every
operating system turns on a self-sustaining snowball style process
known as a bootstrap must complete an automated chain of functions that
gradually increases access to system
hardware and controls once this is done the os becomes
completely responsible for detecting what it and all the other programs need
from the hardware and then supplying that quickly but imagine a world where
every program needed to be written to interact directly with every combination
of pc hardware it would be chaos fortunately we don't need to live in
that world and special pieces of software called device drivers which you
can learn more about here are loaded as part of the booting process these enable
hardware makers to write the code once and allow it to work on a wide variety
of systems running the same or even sometimes just similar operating systems
so you're booted and staring at the desktop what now as soon as you interact
with your computer the software you're using will send out something called a
system call which specifies a task a hardware component must perform in order
for that software to continue functioning and to send further requests
then once the operating system has registered these requests it then
gathers them for organization and processing and that's important so when
a program is first initiated and needs some system memory in order to get up
and running it sends out a call which is received by the os memory manager once
that call has been translated to the hardware's language the os then slots it
into an active queue based on the amount of memory it feels is necessary
otherwise known as its block size when the program is later closed the os will
terminate the blocks which it had previously allocated for it and reserved
them for other programs or just leave them empty if needed in this fashion the
os is constantly receiving calls and
altering cues using system managers for everything from processes to files to
networks and devices so the question now becomes how does the os and its system
managers determine which programs are the most important well it's based on
what we click of course you see the second and often most confounding
function of an operating system is to provide us with a graphical well usually
a graphical user interface that includes everything from the sign in buttons to
the taskbar design and even that annoying little beach ball that never
stops spinning and if done correctly the ui basically
gets out of the way so we can tell the computer what to put at the top of the
queue maybe say for example by maximizing it on the whole screen
the game the game not the stupid antivirus pop-up
now i'm dead that's an example of multitasking behavior in your operating
system gone terribly wrong by the way but without multitasking modern
operating systems wouldn't be able to share resources between different tasks
especially ones running in the background behind what you're actually
focused on like we explained in this video here and everyone yes you nerdy
accountant and you hipster coffee drinkers everyone's computer usage
experience would be a very very different one
speaking of different experiences fresh books imagine if instead of running your
own business by sitting at your computer every night and sending out invoices and
crunching numbers on spreadsheets what if instead of that you actually just
spent your time doing the work that you wanted to be doing and you had a tool
like freshbooks to invoice get paid and
track expenses through the cloud it's an online tool that makes it so you can
focus on the little details like you know actually doing the job and then
making billing your customers as simple as okay well you know i'm a freelance
guy let's say for example i'm gonna log my hours in my phone or other mobile
device as i go throughout the project then at the end
bippity boop i use this to bill it and then the customer can pay credit online
so all the the entire transaction is just much much simpler so if you're a
freelance worker or anyone working for yourself maybe start using a service
that lets you feel like the boss that you actually are head over to
freshbooks.com techwiki to get a free trial of their service and don't forget
to enter Techquickie in the how did you hear about a section
all right i think that's pretty much it guys thanks for watching like this video
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