Multithreaded Programming with JAVA™ Technology

Chapter 1. Introduction

In which we discuss the motivation for creating thread libraries, the advent of shared memory multiprocessors, and the interactions between threads and SMP machines.

Multithreading (MT) is a technique that allows one program to do multiple tasks concurrently. The basic concept of multithreaded programming has existed in research and development labs for several decades. Co-routine systems such as Concurrent Pascal and InterLisp's Spaghetti stacks were in use in the mid-70s and dealt with many of the same issues. Ada's tasks are a language-based construct that maps directly onto threads (so directly, in fact, that current Ada compilers implement tasks with threads). Burroughs shipped a commercial mainframe OS with co-routine-style ...