Operating Systems: Week 1

    We are starting Week 1 of Operating Systems this week. Through the provided videos and readings, I have learned several concepts. One key takeaway is that operating systems are designed to work and to be simple.  I have also gone in-depth into the computer architecture, Linux and the shell, programming in C, and the math related to this class. A computer consists of components like the processor, storage, and I/O devices. The processor performs computations and the storage that we are talking about here stores data. This data can be in the RAM or on a hard drive. The RAM is "volatile" storage, but the hard drive is "non-volatile". I also learned that the way the components of a computer talk to each other is by using buses. A bus takes information, carrying bytes, from memory and passes it into the CPU. 

    During this week, we also learned about the computer storage hierarchy, which includes registers, cache, main memory, magnetic disk, and magnetic tape in this sequence. The higher layers, like registers and cache, are known to be faster but may require a need for more bits.  It is essential to remember the memory layout of a running program while in this class. There is an image that we can remember, and it involves the program code, heap, free space, and the stack in this order. The program code stores the codes, the heap segment stores dynamically allocated variables, and the stack segment is used to store the program call stack. Additionally, we learned some history of Linux and the many contributors who were involved in making it. Overall, this week was informative and established what we will explore during this class.