INTRODUCTION

Information Technology may be at the cutting edge of the platform revolution in

technology but as information makes its way out into the physical world through the
Internet of Things all physical technologies will be increasingly recognized as platforms
becoming designed and operated as such. The smart grid will be a platform, the smart
airport will be a platform, the smart city, car, and house will be platforms and even the
smart door handle will be a platform. This Platform Technologies or popularly known as
Operating Systems installed in the server, desktop, and mobile computing.

This module will present the different features of platform technologies such as
abstraction, evolution, bundling, and interoperability. Platform technologies is an
environment for building and running applications, systems and processes. These can
be viewed as toolsets for developing and operating customized and tailored services.
Technology platform commonly known also as Operating System.
It will expound the brief meaning and descriptions of the different features of the
Operating System such as: computer – system organization, I/O structures, direct
memory access structure, direct memory access structures, computer –system
architecture, operating system structure, operating-system operations, process,
protection and security, computing environments, and open-source operating system.

This module presents the overview of basic components and features of the
different platform technologies. It also gives an extensive overview of the different
features of Operating System. Powerpoint presentation is also included to give you more
details of the module and also as your references.

The number of hours allotted for this module shall be for 3 hours. You are
expected to finish the module in two weeks.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of the module, you should be able to:

1. distinguish accurately the meaning and features of platform technologies;
and,
2. determine comprehensively the definition and extensive overview of
Operating System.

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LESSON 1: Introduction of Platform Technologies and overview of
Operating System and its features.

Objectives:
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
1. identify accurately the meaning of platform technologies;
2. discuss comprehensively the degree of abstraction, bundling,
interoperability and evolution of the platform;
3. identify accurately the meaning of OS; and,
4. discuss comprehensively the OS and its features

Let’s Engage.
Platform technology is a technology that enables the creation of products and
processes and serves as the basis for many other technologies such as automobile, big
data processing technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, grid computing and ICT
(Information and Communication Technology). It establishes the long-term capabilities
of research & development institutes. It can be defined as a structural or technological
form from which various products can emerge without the expense of a new
process/technology introduction

With the rise of information technology and the ever-increasing complexity of our
technology landscape, platforms have become the design paradigm of choice for today's
complex engineered systems. We first saw the power of the platform model in the
development of the personal computer some twenty to thirty years ago as operating
system providers built their technology as a platform for software developers to create
applications on top. But it was not until the past decade with the widespread advent of
the internet that the platform model has truly come of age as virtually every internet
company from the biggest search giants to the smallest little social media widgets has
started to define their solution as a platform.

A computer system has many resources (hardware and software), which may be
to complete a task. The commonly required resources are input/output devices,
memory, file storage space, CPU etc. The operating system acts as a manager of the
above resources and allocates them to specific programs and users, whenever necessary
to perform a particular task. Therefore operating system is the resource manager where
it can manage the resource of a computer system internally. The resources are
processor, memory, files, and I/O devices. In simple terms, an operating system is the
interface between the user and the machine.

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 An operating system is software that manages the computer hardware. The
hardware must provide appropriate mechanisms to ensure the correct operation of the
computer system and to prevent user programs from interfering with the proper
operation of the system.

Internally, operating systems vary greatly in their makeup, since they are
organized along many different lines. The design of a new operating
system is a major task. It is important that the goals of the system be well
defined before the design begins. These goals form the basis for choices
among various algorithms and strategies.

Figure 1. Cellphone installed with Platform and Application levels

(www.systemsinnovation.io)

PLATFORM TECHNOLOGIES FEATURES

A platform is a group of technologies that are used as a base or infrastructure
upon which other applications, technologies or processes are developed for the end-
user. For example, in personal computing, a platform is the basic hardware and
operating system on which software applications can be run. Although the term is most
readily identified with information technology it, of course, applies to all type of
technology. For example, a city is another good model of a platform technology, with a
core set of underlying infrastructure services that are provided for building developers
to construct modular structures in the form of buildings on. This platform allows them
to draw upon underlying services so that they do not have to reinvent them each time
and can thus develop and deploy their buildings more rapidly.

ABSTRACTION
The key to the platform technology architecture is abstraction, as all
platform technologies involve two distinctly different levels to their design with
these different levels defined according to their degree of abstraction. Abstraction
is the quality of dealing with generic forms rather than specific events, details or
applications. In this respect, abstraction means removing the application of the
technology from the underlying processes and functions that support that
application.
The platform is an abstraction, meaning that in itself it does not have
application. For example, you might rent a cloud platform from a provider but in
itself, this is absolutely no use to an end-user they cannot do anything with it.

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Platforms are composed of generic processes that do not have specific
instantiation. The application is designed to bundle these underlying resources
and turn them into a real instance of an application that can be applied in the
real world.
In the auto industry, for example, a car platform is a shared set of common
design, engineering, and production models from which many different specific
models can be created. In this way the car companies have abstracted away from
any specific type of car to create a two-tiered system; one level being generic the
other specific to any instance of that model.
This is a central aspect of the platform model, the creation of a generic
form or set of services, on the underlying platform level, and then on the
application level these services are bundled into different configurations and
customized to the specific needs of the end-user. In such a way a finite amount
of reusable abstract building blocks can be bundled and re-bundled on the
application layer.
This use of abstraction works to remove the complex for the application
developers. By moving core services down to the platform level application
developers can simply plug into these services and build their applications on top
of it, thus working to greatly simplify the complexity they encounter. We can think
about a house as a platform, once there are common protocols, Iot platforms for
houses will be built where any device, technology or item that enters into the
house can then connect into the platform and become an application, the house
platform can then manage these applications, providing them with infrastructure
services and present them as an integrated solution to the house occupants.
This core idea of abstraction is very powerful and can be applied to our
entire technology landscape, with smaller more specific technologies sitting on
top of others that work as the platform supporting them which, in turn, may also
sit on top of others that support them. For example, smart cities will become
platforms with houses being applications that draw upon the common physical
and information resource made available - such as parking, water, electricity etc
- but also the house itself will be a platform for all of the technologies within it
delivering services to them. Each layer in the hierarchy bundles the resources
provided to it from that below and delivers those resources as a service to the
applications that sit on top of it.

BUNDLING
A platform technology has been defined as a structure or technology from
which various products can emerge without the expense of a new process
introduction. This is achieved by defining a core set of building blocks and then
configuring them into different bundles depending on the context.
Effective platform technologies should work like Lego kits, where the
platform provides the elementary building blocks that are then bundled together
on the application level to meet the specific requirements of the end-user. For
example, in enterprise architecture, there is a framework called TOGAF that
defines any organization in terms of a set of building blocks that are essential to
the workings of any enterprise.
Developing an effective platform technology requires a coherent
understanding of what the core services are and thus what those basic building
blocks that any application will need are. This is not evident, it took us many
centuries of building enterprises before we came up with a generic model for the
building blocks of any enterprise outlined in TOGAF.

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 Platform design goes hand in hand with a service-oriented architecture,
where developers of applications treat the building blocks as services that they
then simply string together in different ways to build their solutions. For example,
today a new business can be relatively quickly and easily setup - at least
compared to a few decades ago - because of the core platform of the internet and
the many different services - building blocks - that are available for entrepreneurs
to bundle together into new solutions. For example, within just a few weeks, one
could create a new service by building a web application that draws upon services
from Twitter, for user identity, Etherium for secure transactions, Alibaba for
sourcing materials, Upwork for staffing etc. The fact that you don't have to build
all of these core components yourself, you are just plugging all of them together
means that you can easily and quickly reconfigure them when needed.
At the heart of the platform model is a distinction between the basic
functionalities of the technology and how those functions are composed; a
platform level that deals with the "what" and an application level that deals with
the "how". The basic functions of the technology - the building blocks - are the
"what" and the way those capabilities are strung together is the "how". One could
think of a fab lab as a platform technology, the materials are the "what" or
building blocks that are made available for people to construct into objects
through the use of the machines. The way they use those machines to process
the building blocks into finished products is the "how".

INTEROPERABILITY
Platforms are open systems, unlike traditional technologies that are simply
designed as individual physical objects that perform a function, platforms are
designed to be interoperable with other systems, and they will likely have external
applications running on top of them all of which cannot be fully foreseen by the
developers of the platform. Think of an IoT platform for a house which will have
to interoperate and work with many devices and technologies in the house if it is
to be successful at delivering the end service.
Previously technology was developed largely "in house" with each company
creating their own proprietary systems, delivering it to the end-user, trying to
create lock-in and compete with other companies who were also creating their
own systems. The industrial model of technology development was typically one
of high capital costs, long design and production cycles within closed
organizations creating proprietary technologies with limited interoperability
between the technologies of companies in the same industry.
Much of this industrial model was a product of the physical nature of the
technologies being developed which made them excludable and rivalrous in
nature. But the dematerialized nature of information technology makes it vastly
easier to duplicate and exchange information services and this has a very
profound impact on how we design and build the service systems of today. This
dematerialized nature makes them non-excludable and non-rivalrous which
creates a very different dynamic. The result is one of increasing cooperation as
most of the value is no longer inside of the organization or technology but
increasingly outside of it; the value is increasingly in the system's capacity to
interoperate with other systems.
A smartphone would not be very valuable if it could not connect to the
internet or run other people's applications on it. Most of the value that the end-
user gets from their smartphone is not created by the original technology
developer, but instead by other people connecting into that platform and building
things on it, or that system connecting to other systems - such as to web pages -
with the user getting value from that interoperability and connectivity instead of
so much the device itself. In such a way interoperability becomes key and the

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platform model is designed to optimize for this fluid connectivity between the core
technology and other systems built on it or external to it.
With information technology, we can build once and deploy many times,
almost anywhere at very little cost per extra unit. Facebook can build their
software platform once and through the internet, it can be accessed and used as
a service at extremely little extra cost, per person, to them. With information
technology, the marginal cost of the extra user often goes to almost zero.
In the stand-alone, individual technology paradigm of the industrial
economy the same or similar technology was developed by many different
companies and then they competed for market share. But with service systems a
new model is emerging, that of platform technologies, where various modular
services are made available that can be then plugged into platforms to be
delivered as an integrated experience to the end-user. Interoperability and
collaboration between systems are the key ingredients, and platforms facilitate
this by allowing different technologies to plug into each other and draw upon
their services in a seamless fashion.
A platform technology architecture - being open - is optimized for user
generated systems. A suit of new technologies from solar cells to distributed
manufacturing and virtually all forms of information technology are driving a
revolution in user-generated systems, as capabilities get pushed out to the edges
of networks. In a previous age of centralization when productive capabilities were
centered within large organizations and required large amounts of fixed capital,
then closed organizations made sense.
But today with the rise of the prosumer it is becoming critical that
organizations, business processes and all kinds of technology are able to harness
the input of the end-user if they are to continue to thrive in this world of
distributed technologies. The most successful technology providers of tomorrow
will be those who are able to harness this mass of new capacity and capabilities
on the long tail by providing them with the tools, know-how, methods and
connectivity to participate, and the platform model is idea for this. Sell a man a
fish and you make a bit of money and he feeds himself for a day, give a man a
fishing rod and he can feed himself and you can sell him on-going services for his
fishing rod, also he can help you in developing new innovations for your fishing
rod.

EVOLUTION
The world is speeding up, as the pace of change gets ever faster the
requirement to be able to meet that fast paced change will become ever more
important. Adaptive capacity and agility are, and will increasingly be seen as a
key requirement, if not the key requirement, in the coming decades. In stable and
predictable environments technologies can be built as homogeneous systems
without the capacity to change, enabling them to be optimized for efficiency
within one environment. But as that environment and the pace of innovation
changes, faster and faster, this homogenous architecture appears less viable and
there is a need to switch to a platform model to enable fast-paced innovation at
the edges of networks.
The goal of what we are trying to achieve may stay the same, people will
always want food, clothing, housing, entertainment etc. but in fast paced
environments the context stays changing and thus how we achieve that goal will
change, making it important to be able to bundle and unbundle building blocks
in new ways, quickly and easily.
Platform technologies can be every effective at enabling an evolutionary
process of technology development. The fact that they separate the current

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application from generic processes means that as demands change old
applications can be retired and new more relevant technologies can be built
quickly.
Applications are instances of a technology, an instance is a specific
configuration of a technology for a specific application. For example, a
wheelbarrow is an instance of a technology, it has a specific shape, size, and form
which cannot be easily reconfigured. Any technology that is an application or
instance will go through a linear lifecycle because it does not have the capacity
to reconfigure or regenerate itself.
Traditionally our technologies go through a linear lifecycle from cradle to
grave. For example, imagine building a bicycle, the first time you build it you just
build a whole bicycle from start to finish. Then you have to build another one but
this time for a child, the fact that it has different requirements means you have
to start again from scratch.
While Facebook focused on creating a robust platform that allowed
outside developers to build new applications, Myspace did everything itself.
`We tried to create every feature in the world and said, O.K., we can do it,
why should we let a third party do it?' says MySpace cofounder DeWolfe.
`We should have picked 5 to 10 key features that we totally focused on and
let other people innovate on everything else' – Business Week: The Rise &
Ignominius Fall of MySpace
Every time that you have to build a new bicycle with new requires you start
to get a better idea of what in the development of this technology is a core feature
that remains unchanged and what changes with each different end-user
requirement. If you go on developing bicycles long enough you will eventually
start to see emerging a core platform that remains unchanged and an application
level that changes. When we combine this feature of abstraction to platforms with
user-generated solutions we start to get the potential for a truly evolutionary
development process.
By building a flexible modular structure where components can be easily
bundled and re-bundled, and by putting this closer to the end-user, it allows for
much faster feedback and iteration in the development process. With respect to
agility and adaptability, the key design innovation of platform technologies is in
separating what is permanent from what is contingent and temporal, so as to
build a stable core that can support the rapid reconfiguration of applications
depending on the context and thus make the system agile.
The platform model of reusable building blocks and bundling allows also
for rapid innovation on the application level. The more solid the building blocks
and the lighter the links between them the easier it is to take them apart, change
them around and experiment. The bundling model to platforms offers the
possibility of developing more sustainable technology solutions in that it focuses
our attention on the reusability of systems components. In bundling we can
design to create a light, loosely coupled set of connections - a network - between
the parts during their composition that can be easily dismantled giving us once
again a set of building blocks that can be potentially endlessly bundled into new
solutions.
In such a model we are essentially separating the organizational structure
from the component parts so as to avoid the linear life cycle of a homogeneous
system by being able to unbundle them quickly and easily. In a more traditional
homogenous system, the organization's structure and building blocks are more
or less one. For example, think about a house made out of blocks and mortar for
connecting them, the house will go through a linear lifecycle from cradle to grave

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 where it will be knocked down because it is difficult to separate the building
blocks from how they were composed so as to recompose them. Homogeneous
systems may well be the cheapest option and optimized for efficiency but as
adaptive capacity, resilience and sustainability increase in importance, a
modular platform model may become what greatly more effective in this respect.

OPERATING SYSTEM – The overview

An operating system is a program that manages the computer hardware. It also
provides a basis for application programs and acts as an intermediary between the
computer user and the computer hardware. An amazing aspect of operating systems
is how varied they are in accomplishing these tasks. Mainframe operating systems are
designed primarily to optimize utilization of hardware. Personal computer (PC)
operating systems support complex games, business applications, and everything in
between. Operating systems for handheld computers are designed to provide an
environment in which a user can easily interface with the computer to execute
programs. Thus, some operating systems are designed to be convenient, others to be
efficient, and others some combination of the two.

To truly understand what operating systems are, we must first understand how
they have developed. In this chapter, after offering a general description of what
operating systems do, we trace the development of operating systems from the first
hands-on systems through multiprogrammed and time-shared systems to PCs and
handheld computers. We also discuss operating system variations, such as parallel,
real-time, and embedded systems. As we move through the various stages, we see how
the components of operating systems evolved as natural solutions to problems in early
computer systems.

What Operating Systems Do

We begin our discussions by looking at the operating system's role in the overall

Figure 2. Components: the hardware, the operating system, the application

programs, and the users (figure 2 until 20 – Operating System Concepts
– Silberschatz, Abraham, et.al 9th Edition).