Historical origins
System profilers came into use after punch cards were no longer needed to run programs. Mainframe computers had evolved into have modular architectures at the same time punch cards were being abandoned as input devices. Punch card based mainframe computer systems typically had very rigidly fixed architectures with little variation in input or output devices. Since the 1990s hardware independent system profilers have emerged in some computing architectures, like Linux. Most Unix-like (aka POSIX compliant) operating systems have system hardware independent profilers.Usage origin
InSystem Information.app
, provides system information in simplified tables and trees, whereas detailed, highly-verbose information can be viewed upon executing the /usr/sbin/system_profiler
msinfo32.exe
binary.
List of system profiler software
Microsoft Windows
* System Information – built-in component *GNU/Linux (and some other Unix-like systems)
* uname -a – prints basic information about the current machine and its OS * lshw – prints a list of hardware devices and their properties * dpkg -l – prints a list of all installed packages and their versions (for Linux distributions using Debian-style package management) * rpm -qa – prints a list of all installed packages and their versions (for Linux distributions using Red-Hat-style package management)See also
*