The first OS installed in a computer. In a virtual machine environment, there may be a host operating system that interacts with the virtual machine monitor, which manages the virtual machines.

An operating system designed to work in a network. More complex than a centralized or decentralized architecture, each computer in a distributed system operates and scales independently but is part of ...

Before the World Wide Web became ubiquitous as the de facto way to access electronic information, there were many other ways of retrieving information online. One of the most successful of these was ...

Just because your netbook came with an operating system pre-installed doesn't mean you're stuck with it. If you've swapped out your OS—or stuck with it because it rocks on the netbook!—now's your ...

The giants in handheld computer software, Palm Inc. and Microsoft Corp., will soon get a new competitor: Linux, the free operating system. The cult software, developed by a global network of ...

VMware's 3.0 version goes on sale Monday and will allow a Linux "virtual machine" to run on Microsoft's Windows XP system, among other operating system twists. Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from ...

For decades, industries have treated physical goods and digital systems as separate worlds. Software evolved. Data evolved. Connectivity evolved. But the materials that power global trade remained ...