All computers have physical devices for acquiring input and producing output. After all, what good would a computer be if the users could not tell it what to do and could not get the results after it did the work requested. Many kinds of input and output devices exist, including keyboards, monitors, printers, and so on. It is up to the operating system to manage these devices.
Consequently, every operating system has an I/O subsystem for managing its I/O devices. Some of the I/O software is device independent, that is, applies to many or all I/O devices equally well. Other parts of it, such as device drivers, are specific to particular I/O devices. In Chap. 5 we will have a look at I/O software.
No comments:
Post a Comment