CIOS 110 Lesson 2

In my Internet research on Operating Systems, I came across a rather interesting site, osdata.com. Sadly, it has not been updated much of late, but it contained links to many OSs I had not heard of before, such as Chios. I recalled hearing of other systems such as Fortran. Most of these OSs seemed to be historical, not current systems.

I next turned to wikipedia.com, which is full of information, but one must remember to visit the site with a sense of skepticism, as it can be written and edited by anyone. I focused on personal computers, and found the usual suspects: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD. I'm very familiar with both Windows and Mac OS X, so I chose to read a little more about Linux and BSD.

At this point, Linux still makes me uneasy. I'm just learning about operating systems, so I get nervous when I think that I can completely rewrite the code of a system to suit myself. However, a more technically inclined person would probably enjoy the chance to dabble in the code, and you certainly can't beat the price. I had never heard of BSD before, but I had heard of Unix. It's a good reminder that there are many options available for OSs, but I also think that the big companies became the big companies for a reason. At this point, I'll stick with Windows and Mac OS X, but I'll be sure to keep tabs on how the newer programs are doing over the years.