X-Nico

unusual facts about Operating Systems



Atlas Computer Laboratory

The Atlas Computer Laboratory made important contributions to systems software including operating systems, compilers, computer graphics, and networking.

Autocatalytic set

Examples of practical importance of non-autonomous autocatalytic sets can be found e.g. in the field of compiler construction and in operating systems, where the self-referential nature of the respective constructions is explicitly discussed, very often in terms of the chicken and egg problem.

Dominant design

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. MicrosoftWindows, Apple Inc.Mac OS and IBMOS/2).

Fair-share scheduling

Fair-share scheduling is a scheduling strategy for computer operating systems in which the CPU usage is equally distributed among system users or groups, as opposed to equal distribution among processes.

Mac OS X v10.2

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), the modular printing system for Unix-like operating systems.

Mike Muuss

Due to its usefulness, ping has been implemented on a large number of operating systems, initially BSD Unix, but later others including Windows and Mac OS X.

Mobile Cloud Storage

Ubuntu One from Canonical works with Windows and Linux operating systems and provides the ability to add any folder to the cloud without having to move it.

Peter G. Gyarmati

In his PhD work – Adaptive Controls in Operating Systems — he proposed the so called ADIOS solution, extension to the System/370 family, with the OS/VS2 software.

Spider Systems

Spider Systems produced a wide range of products, including terminal servers, routers, network bridges, network analysers and network protocol software stacks for various operating systems, including the TCP/IP stack used in Microsoft Windows NT 3.1.

Sun Java Calendar Server

The Calendar Server version 6.3 is supported on multiple operating systems including Sun's Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The Home Computer Advanced Course

Subjects included computer applications, computer hardware and software technology, concepts in computer science, practical electronics projects, BASIC and machine code programming, other programming languages, operating systems (including MS-DOS and UNIX), and a jargon dictionary.

The Standard Procurement System

While DoD had previous experience in licensing software, it largely revolved around either desktop computing (operating systems, office automation products, etc.) or back-end servers (mainframe operating systems, relational database management systems, etc.).

Veritas Volume Manager

Microsoft once licensed a version of Veritas Volume Manager for Windows 2000, allowing operating systems to store and modify large amounts of data.


see also

Alexander Peslyak

His code has also been used in various third-party operating systems, such as OpenBSD and Debian.

Architecture of Windows NT

This is distinct from the concept of a "service process", which is a user mode component somewhat analogous to a daemon in Unix-like operating systems.

Ashish Gulhati

His articles and columns in PCQuest and Dataquest magazines in 1993 and 1994 were among the first in the mainstream Indian computing press to inform thousands of readers about alternative operating systems, Unix, Linux, open-source software, Email, the Internet and the World Wide Web, years before Internet access was commercially available in India.

BTRON

BTRON was unable to gain a position in the desktop OS market, however other TRON operating systems continue to be extensively used in small devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras, and CD players.

Caret notation

Acorn operating systems for the Atom, BBC Micro, Archimedes and later RISC OS machines use the vertical bar character | in place of the caret.

Code signing

Many operating systems and frameworks contain built-in trust for one or more existing CAs (such as VeriSign/Symantec, DigiCert, TC TrustCenter, Comodo, GoDaddy, GlobalSign and StartCom).

Command prompt

Command Prompt, or cmd.exe, the command line interpreter in Windows and OS/2 operating systems

Common Component Architecture

Features of the Common Component Architecture that distinguish it from commercial component standards (Component Object Model, CORBA, Enterprise Java Beans) include support for FORTRAN programmers, multi-dimensional data arrays, exotic hardware and operating systems, and a variety of network data transports not typically suited for wide area networks.

Darien Graham-Smith

Dr Graham-Smith holds the title of Technical Editor at the British periodical PC Pro, published monthly by Dennis Publishing, where he is responsible for coverage of technical issues ranging from microprocessor architecture to operating systems.

David E. Potter

In 1998, using Psion’s experience in small mobile operating systems, David led the creation of Symbian Limited in partnership with Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Matsushita to create the operating system standard for mobile wireless devices - now known as Symbian.

Disk cache

Page cache, the cache of disk pages kept by the operating systems, stored in unused main memory.

DVD-RAM

Many operating systems like Mac OS (Mac OS 8.6 up to Mac OS X), Linux and Microsoft Windows XP can use DVD-RAM directly, while earlier versions of Windows require device drivers or the program InCD.

Ease of Access

Ease of Access, formerly Utility Manager, is a component of Windows NT family of operating systems that enables use of assistive technologies.

Enlight cloud

Other operating systems are supported without scaling options, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Window Server 2003 and Windows 7.

Extreme Reality Ltd

The SDK supports Unity, C++ and C# programming languages for multiple operating systems, including iOS, Windows7, Windows8 and WinRT.

Fabasoft Folio

The mobile usage on smartphones (e.g. Android, iPhone) and media tablets (e.g. iPad) is supported by open standards such as HTTPS, WebDAV, CalDAV and CMIS as well as apps for the Android and iOS operating systems.

Galahad library

Support is provided for many operating systems, including Digital UNIX, Tru64 UNIX, Linux, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX and Solaris, and for a variety of popular Fortran 90 compilers on these platforms and operating systems.

Game engine recreation

Emulation of classical systems or operating systems is an alternative to an engine recreation; for instance DOSbox is a notable emulator of the PC/MS-DOS environment.

High-speed multimedia radio

This method is supported by all modern operating systems including but not limited to Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux.

IBMDOS.COM

In Digital Research terminology, the kernel component of the operating system is called the BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System), a term originally coined by Gary Kildall in 1975 for CP/M, but which is continued to be used in all other DRI operating systems.

Iji

According to one indie game community, plans to port Iji to all known modern operating systems (which Daniel Remar himself gave permission for) have fallen through.

Initialization

Booting, a process that starts computer operating systems

Insight – ICT for the differently abled

The training programme makes use of Orca (an assistive technology for the visually challenged), Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux based operating systems.

IWARP

Networking services implemented over iWARP include those offered in the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) by the OpenFabrics Alliance for Linux operating systems, and the Winsock Direct protocol for Microsoft Windows.

JSBSim

JSBSim has been in development and use since 1996, and has been built on all of the most popular platforms in use today including those running Linux, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Karbar

Its articles, aimed at all levels of user, cover applications, programming, operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.), graphics, animation, software, hardware, internet and games.

KMPlayer

Konqueror Media Player, an open-source media player software for KDE that runs on Unix-like operating systems

Memory management unit

Some operating systems, such as OpenBSD with its W^X feature, and Linux with the Exec Shield or PaX patches, may also limit the length of the code segment, as specified by the CS register, to disallow execution of code in modifiable regions of the address space.

MicroStation

The latest versions of the software are released solely for Microsoft Windows operating systems, but historically MicroStation was available for Macintosh platforms and a number of Unix-like operating systems.

Multi-channel app development

Multi-channel app development (sometimes known as cross-platform development) refers to the method of being able to support multiple operating systems and multiple deployment methods (Native, HTML5/mobile web, mixed mode) from a single development platform.

Multiseat desktop virtualization

MultiSeat Desktop Virtualization is a method by which a common desktop PC, with extra keyboards, mice, and video screens directly attached to it, can be used to install, load, and concurrently run multiple operating systems.

MultitrackStudio

MultitrackStudio or MTS for short is a digital audio workstation platform for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, developed by Bremmers Audio Design.

Net Applications

While the statistics released by the company routinely place Operating Systems sold by Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (Mac OS X) with a high market share in the desktop computer category (through 2013), Vincent Vizzaccaro (EVP - Marketing and Strategic Alliances, Net Applications, 2002-) has stated that Microsoft and Apple are among the company's clients.

Netpbm

It is included in all major open source Unix-like operating system distributions and also works on other Unix-like operating systems, Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms.

Object Pascal

Currently, FPC can generate code for x86, x86-64, PowerPC, SPARC, and ARM processors, and for various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS and Mac OS X (with an Xcode integration kit).

PSX

The POSIX emulation subsystem on various DEC and IBM operating systems

Redirector

COM port redirector, for Windows operating systems relay serial data between a "virtual" COM port and a serial device server or modem server on a network; TTY redirectors perform the same function for UNIX/Linux operating systems

SciTech SNAP

SciTech SNAP Graphics has been ported to MS-DOS, OS/2, Microsoft Windows (CE, NT, 2000, XP), QNX, SMX (the SunOS/Solaris port of MINIX), Linux, On Time RTOS-32, Unununium OS operating systems.

SilverFast

SilverFast Ai Studio supports prepress drum scanners made by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Linotype - Hell) on Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, as well as Mac OS X 10.3-10.5 operating systems.

Spy Fox

When running with ScummVM, these games can be played on different operating systems, including Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

Supervisory program

Historically, this term was essentially associated with IBM's line of mainframe operating systems starting with OS/360.

TXF

Transactional NTFS, a component of Windows Vista and later operating systems

UTF-16

UTF-16 is used by the Qualcomm BREW operating systems; the .NET environments; and the Qt cross-platform graphical widget toolkit.

UTF-EBCDIC

IBM EBCDIC-based mainframe operating systems, such as z/OS, usually use UTF-16 for complete Unicode support.

Visual Planet

Visualplanet's MA9 software provides Mouse Pointer options for use with the visualplanet touchfoil which is suitable for standard mouse emulation within Windows 7, MacOS and Linux Operating Systems.

Windowing system

Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS (version 9 and earlier), and Palm OS, contain a windowing system which is integrated with the OS.

Zachary Barth

For marketing reasons, Barth decided against XNA with its capability to cross-publish to Xbox 360, and switched to OpenGL, which allowed him to target the three operating systems required for inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle.

ZyLAB Technologies

Subsequent programs were written in C, C++ and C# and work on a variety of Microsoft operating systems.