Time-Sharing

For other possible meanings, see Time share (disambiguation)  Time-sharing refers to sharing a computing resource among many users by multitasking. Because early mainframes and minicomputers were extremely expensive, it was rarely possible to allow a single user exclusive access to the machine for interactive use. But because computers in interactive use often spend much of their time idly waiting for user input, it was suggested that multiple users could share a machine by using one user's idle time to service other users. Similarly, small slices of time spent waiting for disk, tape, or network input could be granted to other users.
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<operating system> (Or "timesharing") An operating system feature allowing several users to run several tasks concurrently on one processor, or in parallel on many processors, usually providing each user with his own terminal for input and output. time-sharing is multitasking for multiple users.
(1998-04-24)