What is System Software???????

System Software

System software is one of the most essential part of the computer system. It is a set of programs that controls, organizes and utilizes the hardware in a computer and deals with the environmental requirement to execute application software. System software consists of four main kind of programs namely Operating system software, utility software, device driver and language translators.

1. Operating System Software

Operating system software is a master among the system software because it controls all the activities that takes place within a computer. It is used to direct input and output of data, keeping track of files and also controlling the processing of computer. Every OS software performs three basic tasks running application, managing resources and providing user interface. It should be noted that modern OS are more machine independent and are capable of running on any hardware platform. Example of OS software are Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Sun Solaris and some more.

2. Utility Program System Software

Utility software are designed to perform special tasks related to the management of computer functions, file compression, virus protection, computer files and resources, memory management and password protection. Many utility programs are built directly in the operating system for ease and some other utility programs are to be bought separately. Some main categories of utility programs are disk toolkits, backup utility, data compression utilities and virus protection.

3. Device Driver

Device driver is a set of programs that allows other programs to interact with the hardware. These drivers interact with the device through computer bus or communication system. Drivers are OS dependent so driver for Windows OS in almost all cases will not work with the Linux OS.

4. Translator Program

Translator programs are computer programs that converts human convenient programming code to machine readable language. There is one translator program for each programming language. The three basic kinds of translator programs are assembler, compiler and interpreter.

Assembler: Assembler is a translator that converts assembly language into machine readable form. The program written in assembly language is called the source program and the machine language program is called object program.

Compiler: Compiler is a program that converts high level language into machine code in a single operation. It generally reports all error of the program at once. After we debug the program, it is recompiled and compiler is no linger needed in memory because the object program is available. Some language that uses compiler are C, C++ and FORTRAN.

interpreter: Interpreter is a computer program that translates high level language to machine language line by line. If there is any error in the program in any line, user is notified about the error and program execution is stopped. Interpreter is considered and easy to user translator and uses less memory. BASIC programming language uses interpreter.