Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Multi-user operating systems allow multiple users to utilise the computer and run programss at the same time. All time-sharing systems are multi-user systems, but most batch processing systems for mainframes were too, to avoid leaving the expensive CPU idle while it waited for I/O operations to complete. The most obvious example is a Unix server where multiple remote users have access (via Telnet) to the Unix shell prompt at the same time.\n This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.