The Amiga operating system featured one of the first implementations of true preemptive multitasking in a personal computer, allowing multiple programs to execute simultaneously without cooperation from running applications. The Exec kernel managed task scheduling using priority-based algorithms, where higher-priority tasks could interrupt lower-priority ones, ensuring responsive system behavior even under heavy load. Unlike cooperative multitasking systems common in contemporary 1980s computers, AmigaOS prevented a single crashed application from freezing the entire system, though it lacked memory protection, meaning all tasks shared the same address space.