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To: Phillip C. Lee who wrote (17075)	8/21/1998 1:58:00 PM
From: Kok Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

OT. Multi-threading was originally developed by DEC VMS, they called it multi-tasking, best in real time system. If you like VMS, you must really love Windows-NT (architected by the same chap). Serious programmers may make a distinction between multithreading and multitasking. Multithreading is really a thread-based version of multitasking. There is also the process-based variety of multitasking. Multithreading allows a single program to have multiple, possibly concurrent, execution threads. Often, these threads share a common address space. Multithreading is easy to implement in Macintosh through the Threads library. On a 68000, the threads library even supports premptive tasking. Process-based multitasking is, of course, also possible on Macintosh. How else would you run many apps at the same time on your desktop. What is not yet possible is preemptive process-level multitasking. As to Alomex' mention of threading spaghetti (LOL), the example of multiprocessing deadlocks was often explained using "dining philosopher" problem. Involves a ring of philosophers eating spaghetti(!!!) using shared forks. BTW, I encountered multiprocessing as far back as the Multics operating system in the '60s; VMS came much later, around 1978. In fact, I remember some multithreading work done in RSX-11 and MUMPS for the PDP-11. Even the older DEC RT-11 real-time executive and the Data General Nova had the concept of concurrent foreground and background tasks. VMS didn't appear until the VAX 11-780. How I remember it... But, you know what they say about memory being the second thing to go (now that there is Viagra, memory is probably the first thing to go :-). Cheers, Kok Chen