Computer multitasking: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:25, 15 January 2018

Revision as of 09:41, 15 January 2018

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{{Main|Cooperative multitasking}}

The expression "time sharing" usually designatedreferred to computers shared by interactive users at terminals, such as IBM's [[Time Sharing Option|TSO]], and [[CP/CMS|VM/CMS]]. The term "time-sharing" is no longer commonly used, having been replaced by "multitasking", following the advent of personal computers and workstations rather than shared interactive systems.

Early multitasking systems used applications that voluntarily ceded time to one another. This approach, which was eventually supported by many computer [[operating system]]s, is known today as cooperative multitasking. Although it is now rarely used in larger systems except for specific applications such as [[CICS]] or the [[JES2]] subsystem, cooperative multitasking was once the scheduling scheme employed by [[Microsoft Windows]] (prior to [[Windows 95]] and [[Windows NT]]) and [[Classic Mac OS]] (prior to [[macOS|Mac OS X]]) in order to enable multiple applications to be run simultaneously. [[Windows 9x]] also used cooperative multitasking, but only for 16-bit legacy applications, much the same way as pre-[[Mac OS X Leopard|Leopard]] [[PowerPC]] versions of Mac OS X used it for [[Classic (Mac OS X)|Classic]] applications. The network operating system [[NetWare]] used cooperative multitasking up to NetWare 6.5. Cooperative multitasking is still used today on [[RISC OS]] systems.<ref>