
In multiprogramming systems, a task runs until it must wait for an external event or until the operating system's scheduler forcibly swaps the running task out of the CPU. In a time-sharing system, multiple human operators use the same processor as if it was dedicated to their use, while behind the scenes the computer is serving many users by multitasking their individual programs. It allows more efficient use of the computer hardware where a program is waiting for some external event such as a user input or an input/output transfer with a peripheral to complete, the central processor can still be used with another program. Multitasking is a common feature of computer operating systems. Even on multiprocessor computers, multitasking allows many more tasks to be run than there are CPUs. Multitasking does not require parallel execution of multiple tasks at exactly the same time instead, it allows more than one task to advance over a given period of time.
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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). 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. 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. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end.

In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. Multitasking capabilities of Microsoft Windows 1.01 released in 1985, here shown running the MS-DOS Executive and Calculator programs
