Windows® vs. Linux

It was inevitable that operating systems—and computer system in general—at least in the year 2012, are not anything like those envisioned by science fictionists, novelists, and screen writers of the early and mid 20th century. For the most part, they saw computers as a single entity one system controlling everything, like a giant brain reaching out and serving each end-user anonymously. And there were surely no “blue screens of death.”

Computers today come in hundreds of flavors. Let’s say you want a tablet instead of a keyboard, no problem. Need to run a multi-million dollar company with an extensive database from home? No problem. Interfaces and operating systems and software applications and hardware upgrades and I/O devices provide each and every person on the planet a customized computer experience. We should thank capitalism for many of the technological advances that have come about over the past fifty years. After all, money has a tendency to flow to the products that make our lives the most enjoyable.

Three of the most notable advances in computer history are servers (formerly known as mainframes), Microsoft Windows, and the Linux operating system. Each one in its own right could fill volumes. However, the objective of this paper is to simply highlight a few of the most prominent features each of these advances has to offer. We will start with the most notorious MS Windows®.

Microsoft has been in the computer industry for many years, and it is one of the most well-known companies worldwide, the majority of the operating systems these days are from Microsoft. Windows 7 was a fast selling operating system, historically sold more than 240 million around the globe. Users could tell very fast that Windows 7 was easy to use, it was indeed Microsoft newest and most powerful operating system, it works with