Supervisor - Definition and Overview

This article is about the Atlas Supervisor computer program. In general, a supervisor is a person who assigns tasks to other persons, and monitors that the tasks are being correctly performed.

The Atlas Supervisor was the program which managed the allocation of processing resources of the Atlas Computer (of the University of Manchester) so that the machine was able to act on many tasks and User Programs concurrently. In other words, the Atlas Supervisor may arguably be called the very first computer operating system.