TIME SHARING SYSTEMS

Time-sharing system:
Time-sharing refers to sharing a computing resource among many users by multitasking.
Because early mainframes and minicomputers were extremely expensive, it was rarely possible to allow a single user exclusive access to the machine for interactive use. But because computers in interactive use often spend much of their time idly waiting for user input, it was suggested that multiple users could share a machine by allocating one user's idle time to service other users. Similarly, small slices of time spent waiting for disk, tape, or network input could be granted to other users.
Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s, computer terminals were multiplexed onto large institutional mainframe computers (central computer systems), which in many implementations sequentially polled the terminals to see if there was any additional data or action requested by the computer user. Later technology in interconnections were interrupt driven, and some of these used parallel data transfer technologies like, for example, the IEEE 488 standard. Generally, computer terminals were utilized on college properties in much the same places as desktop computers or personal computers are found today. In the earliest days of personal computers, many were in fact used as particularly smart terminals for time-sharing systems.
With the rise of microcomputing in the early 1980s, time-sharing faded into the background because the individual microprocessors were sufficiently inexpensive that a single person could have all the CPU time dedicated solely to their needs, even when idle.
The Internet has brought the general concept of time-sharing back into popularity. Expensive corporate server farms costing millions can host thousands of customers all sharing the same common resources. As with the early serial terminals, websites operate primarily in bursts of activity followed by periods of idle time. This bursting nature permits the service to be used by many website customers at once, and none of them notice any delays in communications until the servers start to get very busy.