About
About this lecture
This site is a short, illustrated lecture on what an operating system is and what it does. It is meant to be read in one sitting — about fifteen minutes, less if you skim — and it assumes nothing in particular about the reader except curiosity.
Why a lecture, not a webpage?
Most of what's online about operating systems is either a textbook chapter or a comparison article. This site tries to sit somewhere else: closer to the feeling of a sympathetic teacher walking through the topic at the front of a room, moving one idea at a time, drawing on the board when it helps, not stopping to footnote.
There are no citations and no homework. The aim is understanding, not completeness. If you want the full picture, every university library has a copy of Tanenbaum or Silberschatz waiting for you.
How it's built
It's a small static site: plain HTML, CSS, and a single short JavaScript file. No framework, no build step, no analytics, no cookies. It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages because Cloudflare Pages is good at serving exactly this kind of thing.
The illustrations are inline SVG so they scale crisply on any screen and follow the page's light or dark theme. You can read the source by opening the developer tools, or by browsing the repository.
Getting around
Use the arrow keys, the buttons at the bottom, or swipe on a touch screen. Home and End jump to the first and last slides. T toggles the colour scheme.
Feedback
This is a hand-built lecture; corrections and suggestions are welcome through the project's issue tracker.