The Atlas Supervisor was the program which managed the allocation of processing resources of
Manchester University's Atlas Computer
The Atlas Computer was one of the world's first supercomputers, in use from 1962 (when it was claimed to be the most powerful computer in the world) to 1972. Atlas' capacity promoted the saying that when it went offline, half of the United Ki ...
so that the machine was able to act on
many tasks and
user programs concurrently.
Its various functions included running the Atlas computer's
virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very l ...
(Atlas Supervisor paper, section 3, Store Organisation) and is ‘considered by many to be the first recognisable modern
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
’.
Brinch Hansen
Per Brinch Hansen (13 November 1938 – 31 July 2007) was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing.
Biography
Early life and education
Per B ...
described it as "the most significant breakthrough in the history of operating systems."
References
;Notes
;Bibliography
*
*
External links
The Atlas Supervisor paper (T Kilburn, R B Payne, D J Howarth, 1962)
1962 software
Discontinued operating systems
{{operating-system-stub