High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In computing, an operating system (OS) is software (programs and data) that provides an interface between the hardware and other software. The OS is responsible for management and coordination of processes and allocation and sharing of hardware resources such as RAM and disk space, and acts as a host for computing applications running on the OS. An operating system may also provide orderly accesses to the hardware by competing software routines. This relieves the application programmers from having to manage these details. Operating systems offer a number of services to application programs. Applications access these services through application programming interfaces (APIs) or system calls. By invoking these interfaces, the application can request a service from the operating system, pass parameters, and receive the results of the operation. On large systems such as Unix-like systems, the user interface is always implemented as software that runs outside the operating system. In some other systems like Windows, the Window manager can be part of the operating system itself.

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