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An operating system is the most important piece of software on a desktop PC, Laptop, Tablet, mobile phone or other device. Even in-car satellite navigation systems require an operating system to run.

The operating system is crucial for managing system resources, installing drivers, creating and browsing folders, creating files, installing applications as well as providing a "springboard" on which you can execute other applications and perform other tasks. The operating system acts as a "middleman" between these applications and the computer hardware. It allows for multi-tasking (in the case of multi-task OS) meaning that several programs can run at once, as long as the hardware is capable of it and adequate system resources are available.

The operating system will be installed on your hard drive or embedded in the devices' flash memory (in the case of mobile phones, PDAs, sat-navs and handheld gaming devices). After the PC has been turned on, and the BIOS has run, the operating system will launch.

Popular examples of operating systems are; Windows, Linux, iOS, Andriod and OSX, these are the five operating systems that most people will be familiar with. Most of them (apart from Microsoft operating systems) share roots in UNIX.

The first generation of computers had no operating systems. Programs were often entered in rows of mechanical switches. The first operating systems were invented as far back as the 1950s, though these were very basic and were limited to resident monitor functions that would allow different programs to run in succession rather than true multi-tasking. General Motors and IBM were behind a lot of the early-use of operating systems in industry. These were known as single-stream batch processing systems.

Though there were experiments pioneering the use of multi-tasking, it wasn't in widespread use. It wasn't until the 1960s that something nearer to modern operating systems were available. These were still batch processing systems like their predecessors, however, they were capable of running several programs at once.

By the 1980s, MS-DOS and UNIX came along (remember we mentioned UNIX earlier). This was really the start of modern operating systems in home computers. Though programs still required execution through a command line, rather than clicking on a .EXE file on a graphical user interface OS like Windows.

It was from these operating systems that modern operating systems were born. MS-DOS was discontinued in the year 2000, though UNIX survives today in various forms. Long before this time though, MS-DOS was only included in Windows for troubleshooting, bootstrapping and backwards compatibility. But it exists today in the form of emulators that provide backwards compatibility for programs such as DOSBox.

And that brings us to the modern day operating systems which are essentially GUIs that have been built on top of these older operating systems like MS-DOS and have evolved to become their own OS. The early 16-bit version of Windows was in fact MS-DOS with a GUI.

The evolution of operating systems is still developing at a rapid pace today. Mobile phones are a prime example. Since mobile phones have become more complex and turned into what we know as "smartphones" the operating systems have had to change a great deal to keep up with this new technology. iOS for example; has had to undergo changes which allows for better multi-taking and also a primitive task-manager for the user to manage their phones' resources and see what's running in the background. These modern smartphone operating systems are beginning to closely resemble those found on a home PC.