@jeff >your program is being interpreted by the kernel
Sorry, but I'd just like to interject for a moment.

Kernels don't typically interpret C programs - what they do instead is schedule the process and at certain time periods, load all the registers back from the stack, jmp execution to the right instruction in .data and after a set period, dump all the registers to stack and then jmp execution elsewhere.

If a kernel does this thousands of times a second, it looks like the computer is doing a bunch of things at once, although only one thing is happening at a time.