Advanced Python Programming

The history of concurrency

The concept of concurrency has been around for quite some time. The idea developed from early work on railroads and telegraphy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some terms have even survived to this day (such as semaphore, which indicates a variable that controls access to a shared resource in concurrent programs). Concurrency was first applied to address the question of how to handle multiple trains on the same railroad system, in order to avoid collisions and maximize efficiency, and how to handle multiple transmissions over a given set of wires in early telegraphy.

A significant portion of the theoretical groundwork for concurrent programming was actually laid in the 1960s. The early algorithmic ...