A species of
multitasking in which the process currently utilizing the
CPU must play nice and offer other processes a turn. As in
socialism, if all the processes don't cooperate the results can be
quite nasty. Both the
Macintosh and
Windows 3.x operating systems are based on
cooperative multitasking, which is why they crash so often. More sophisticated OSes such as
*nix,
BeOS,
Windows 9x (well, mostly),
Windows NT, and
OS/2 are based on
preemptive multitasking.
Am I implying that Win95 is more sophisticated than MacOS? Well, sortof. I'm primarily talking about multitasking here, however.