You can think of it as the reactor pattern. You only have one physical CPU so all you are doing is churning through callback-based event handlers.

The callbacks in this case might be the literal interrupt handlers (in which case your dispatcher "loop" is actually the hardware). Or else you make your interrupt write a little bit of state that then gets dispatched by your actual event loop.

Either way, you write responsive software by doing everything in short-running callbacks.

I find it amusing that (some) sophisticated GUI and server framework for big computers re-invent this.