Re: Demo: multithreading

From: Michael Wojcik (mwojcik_at_newsguy.com)
Date: 05/25/04 

Date: 24 May 2004 23:47:11 GMT

In article <217e491a.0405231912.35165f9@posting.google.com>, riplin@Azonic.co.nz (Richard) writes:
> robert.deletethis@wagner.net (Robert Wagner) wrote
>
> > I should have said 'The first Unix thread library was written by Sybase ...'
>
> They may well have written a library, but as a technique it was done
> in Unix well before the 'late 80s'. Whether they wrote the _first_
> library is not necessarily determinable. Perhaps many others wrote
> libraries but didn't tell you (or indeed anyone) about them.

The comp.os.research FAQ, in its section on the history of threading,
claims that Unix "lightweight" processes with shared address space
(ie preemptively-scheduled threads) "date[] back to the very late 70s
or early 80s, i.e. to the first `microkernels' (Thoth (precursor of
the V-kernel and QNX), Amoeba, Chorus, the RIG-Accent-Mach family,
etc)".[1] It doesn't mention thread library implementations, but I
think the safest thing to say is that it's not clear when threads were
introduced to Unix as a facility for normal user-mode programs (as
opposed to kernel tasks).

1. http://www.serpentine.com/~bos/os-faq/FAQ-1.html#The-history-of-threads 

-- 
Michael Wojcik                  michael.wojcik@microfocus.com
The antics which have been drawn together in this book are huddled here
for mutual protection like sheep.  If they had half a wit apiece each
would bound off in many directions, to unsimplify the target.
 -- Walt Kelly

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