Ch 2 · The Operating System's Jobs · Theory
Topic 2 of 9 in System Software & the Toolchain — What Runs Your Programs — 2 lessons.
The Manager of the Machine
The operating system (OS) manages the computer's resources so programs can run. Its main jobs:
Multitasking
A computer *appears* to run many programs at once. On a single core the OS actually switches between them extremely fast (scheduling), giving each a slice of CPU time. The A-Level version of this (scheduling, paging, virtual memory) builds directly on this idea.