multitasking

Modern desktop operating systems are capable of handling large numbers of different processes at the same time. This screenshot shows Fedora Linux running simultaneously with the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment, Firefox, KCalc, the built-in calendar, GNU nano, GIMP, and the VLC media player. Multitasking of Microsoft Windows 1.01 released in 1985, here shown running the MS-DOS Executive and Calculator programs

In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result, a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources such as central processing units (CPUs) and main memory. Multitasking automatically interrupts the running program, saving its state (partial results, memory contents and computer register contents) and loading the saved state of another program and transferring control to it. This "context switch" may be initiated at fixed time intervals (pre-emptive multitasking), or the running program may be coded to signal to the supervisory software when it can be interrupted (cooperative multitasking).