What makes modern operating systems different from MS-DOS and operating systems alike and lets them simultaneously running multiple processes at the same time is the invention of virtual memory.
Virtual memory is like a holder for each process. Each process has its own virtual memory space for this process, its related libraries, and all memory allocated for this process from the stack, heap, and private memory.
This virtual memory has a mapper to the equivalent physical memory. Not all virtual memory pages are mapped to physical memory, and each mapped one has its own permission (READ|WRITE, READ|EXECUTE, or maybe READ|WRITE|EXECUTE), as shown in the following diagram:
Virtual memory allows you to create a security layer between one process and another and allows the operating system to manage different processes and suspend one process to give resources to another.
