Time‐Sharing Systems

Abstract The article introduces the concept of time sharing and presents its history and different areas of application. Then, the virtualization of the machine as necessary for time sharing is explained in more detail, discussing the affected resources of memory, disk, network, and—most importantly—the (CPU). Metrics and necessary hardware support follow this discussion. Finally, more advanced areas of time sharing are presented: real‐time systems, multi‐CPU/multicore/multithreaded environments, and dedicated HPC resources. The article concludes with the extraction of the most important design decisions and the current trends.