The Multi-user reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Multi-user

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.

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