Chief Functions of an Operating System.

The chief function of an operating system, we said, is to manage the resources of a complex computer system. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. The development of operating systems to their present day form is a good illustration of that. At each stage in this development, bottlenecks were found which prevented using the computer resources to their fullest capacity. The need to eliminate those bottlenecks gave impetus to inventiveness …

…processes within a uniprocessor system. Multiprocessing: The management of multiple processes within a multiprocessor. We see, then, that the term multiprocessing comes from multiprocessor, whereas the term multitasking comes from task. Since a process (or task) is a program in execution, we can see that the concept "the management of multiple processes" is not far from "the management of multiple programs." It is unfortunate that the development of OS terminology created this source of confusion.