General Software Definitions

General Software Definitions

General software definitions

This site uses the BCS Glossary for definitions (of which copies are available in the Winterstoke Library). You should also read widely. If you use just one or two textbooks exclusively on your course, you will get a very biased and narrow view of a topic. Read widely to widen and deepen your knowledge! Another problem that you will come across all of the time (if you haven't already) is that there are often different words for the same thing in Computing, and authors' descriptions of the same thing can be different! There's nothing you can do about this except to read widely and make your own mind up! The formal software-related definitions you should know at this stage are detailed below.

Systems software

Systems software is 'the collection of programs available for the total control of the running of a computer system'. It includes the operating system, utility programs, library programs and translators.

Operating system

An operating system is "a program or suite of programs that controls the entire operation of the computer". You have probably experienced some operating systems already, for example Windows XP, Windows Vista, RISC-OS, Linux or DOS. It has a number of important jobs to do such as making the hardware in a computer work together, reporting any errors it finds in the computer and providing a user interface between the user and the computer, to name but three.

Utility program

A utility program is a "systems program designed to perform a commonplace task, for example, the transfer of data from one storage device to another, sorting a set of data, or a disk editor for directly editing the contents of a disk". Operating systems come with ready-made pre-written programs that do very specific jobs a computer user will commonly need to do.

Library program

A library program is a program that does a specific job and is available for users to call up and use in their own programs. For example, you might have a library program that deals with printing. Rather than users each writing their own program to print out something, they can simply call up and use a pre-written, proven library program that can handle this for them. This means that they don't have to spend time and effort writing their own, and then debugging it.

Translator

A translator is "a computer program used to convert a program from one language to another, for example, from a low-level language to machine code". We have said a user interface is needed to allow humans and computers to work with each other because they don’t speak the same language. In much the same way, when a human writes a program, perhaps a computer game or a word processing application, it will not be in the language the computer understands. Once the program has been written, it first needs to be ‘translated’ and then the computer can run it.

User interface

A user interface is a method "for communication between the user and the computer". Users communicate using languages such as English, Spanish and so on. Computers do not understand these languages. They are digital devices - they understand only ones and zeros. So that communication in both directions can take place, an interface is provided. This effectively converts human-speak into computer-speak and vice versa.

Programming language

These are pieces of software used to write applications that can be useful to humans in some way. Once written, they are then translated by another piece of software called a ‘translator’ into the machine code that is understood by the CPU. The CPU then runs, or 'executes' the machine code. Applications such as PowerPoint and Word are written using a programming language.

Applications software

This is a piece of software that someone has written that does something userful for a user. Examples include a word processor, an MP3 player, a spreadsheet application and a graphocs package.

Generic application

An applications program is "a computer information system designed to carry out a task (such as keeping accounts, editing text) which would need to be carried out even if computers did not exist". A 'generic application' is an application that can be used in many different circumstances. For example, the application Access can be used in many different database scenarios. The application Word can be used to produce many different kinds of word-processed documents.

Integrated package

An integrated package is one which is made up of a number of separate but closely linked applications, such as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. These integrated applications make it easy to share data between the different applications. Learning each application is also relatively easy; once you have learnt one application you have a head start in learning the others because the layout of the application you learnt, the icons used, menus and so on are usually identical to the other applications in the package.