A means by which several jobs—data plus the programs to manipulate the data—share the processing time and other resources of a computer. A brief period is allocated to each job by the computer’s operating system, and the computer switches rapidly between jobs. A multiaccess system relies on time sharing.
Computer
A technique, first advocated by Christopher Strachey, for sharing the time of a computer among several jobs, switching between them so rapidly that each job appears to have the computer to itself. See alsomultiaccess system.
Electronics and Electrical Engineering
A form of time-division multiplexing by which a number of users may communicate directly with a computer by means of a number of individual terminals. The speed of operation of the machine is such that each user receives the impression of being the sole user of it. See alsointeractive.