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Time-sharing was the first time that multiple processes, owned by different users, were running on a single machine, and these processes could interfere with one another. [44] For example, one process might alter shared resources which another process relied on, such as a variable stored in memory.
Time-sharing allowed multiple users to use a computer concurrently: each program appeared to have full access to the machine, but only one program was executed at the time, with the system switching between programs in time slices, saving and restoring state each time.
The operating system maintains this table to keep track of which processes are waiting for which devices. One field in the table is the memory address of the process control block. Place all the characters to be sent to the device into a memory buffer. [65] Set the memory address of the memory buffer to a predetermined device register. [77]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computers: Computers – programmable machines designed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations. The sequences of operations can be changed readily, allowing computers to solve more than one kind of problem.
Preemptive multitasking allows the computer system to more reliably guarantee to each process a regular "slice" of operating time. It also allows the system to deal rapidly with important external events like incoming data, which might require the immediate attention of one or another process.
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
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The universal Turing machine was a type of stored-program computer capable of mimicking the operations of any Turing machine (computer model) based on the software instructions passed to it. The storage of computer programs is key to the operation of modern computers and is the connection between computer hardware and software. [ 7 ]