allows many users at different terminals to communicate with a single computer at the same time
Computer multitasking Early multitasking systems used applications that voluntarily ceded time to one another. This approach, which was eventually supported by many computer operating systems, 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 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-Leopard PowerPC versions of Mac OS X used it for 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.[2]