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According to Andrew Tannenbaum, the creator of Minix and the author of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, the two chief tasks of an operating system. The first function is to provide an abstraction layer above the hardware that is easier to program than the bare hardware. By providing this function, the user is freed from the need to worry about interrupts, timers, memory management and other low-level functions. The second function of an operating system is to manager all the various resources of the computer (CPU time slices, RAM, printing etc.) and dole them out wisely among all the various programs competing for them. As an example, let's look at the printer. Imagine if three programs were trying to send output to a printer at the same time. Without an operating system managing the resources, the result would be chaos: a few lines from program 1, a few lines of program 2, a few line from program 3, etc.

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