Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!halley!bc
From: bc@halley.UUCP (Bill Crews)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT & "threads"
Message-ID: <401@halley.UUCP>
Date: 1 Nov 88 00:09:47 GMT
References: <10736@reed.UUCP> <363@thor.wright.EDU>
Reply-To: bc@halley.UUCP (Bill Crews)
Organization: Tandem Computers, Austin, TX
Lines: 21

In article <363@thor.wright.EDU> jsloan@wright.UUCP writes:
>
>Threads are neat. Not necessarily new, although MACH and OS/2 are the
>first "commercial" operating systems that I'm aware to feature them,
>but still neat.

CICS has been around for a decade or so.  Its tasks are threads.

Data General once had an in-memory real-time OS called RTOS, which supported
nothing but threads.  When they made it disk-based (RDOS), each of the
foreground and background partitions could multitask as RTOS previously did.
Then they arrived at AOS and later AOS/VS.  In these, each of the many OS
processes can multitask.  The threads are called tasks.

I'm sure there are many other examples, and older ones, too.  Threads are not
at all new.  Formal treatment of threads in OS theory seems to be somewhat
newer than the implementations to date, oddly enough, n'est ce pas?

-bc
-- 
Bill Crews                        bc@halley.UUCP
(512) 244-8350                    ..!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!halley!bc