🚀 go-pugleaf

john@iastate.edu (John Hascall) writes:
>firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes:
>}>The OS world is moving towards multithreading...
>
>}It is with some trepidation that I amend one of Don Lindsay's comments,
>}but in my experience it is only the C/Unix world that is moving towards
>}multithreading.  The rest of the world has been there for a very long time.
>
>Perhaps the research world has been...
>But as far as (popular) commercially available OSes, it would seem not:
>
>  MS-DOS:  not a chance
>     VMS:  nope
>     MVS:  sort of, but horrid
>      VM:  I dunno, and I hope never to find out ;-)
>    OS/2:  ditto
	    Yes, as I understand it.
>    UNIX:  not yet
>   OSF/1:  yes, but not much of a commercial success at this point

  AmigaOS:  Yes (actually it's kind of your only choice)
    MacOS:  No
TOS (yech): No, maybe with the vapor-ish "Falcon"
       NT:  Yes, I think (not sure).

Note that most/all of the OS's _designed_ after about '85 or so have some level
of preemptive thread support (AmigaOS, OS/2, NT, sort-of-new OSF/1).  TOS is
running a modified CPM/68K (aka pre-85), so I don't count it.  The MacOS might
have had it (Lisa was multitasking), but tasking got dropped.  The MacOS will
probably have it sometime in the future.

Of course, the definition of "thread" may vary...

-- 
GNU Emacs is a LISP operating system disguised as a word processor.
 - Doug Mohney, in comp.arch

Randell Jesup, Jack-of-quite-a-few-trades, Commodore Engineering.
jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
Disclaimer: Nothing I say is anything other than my personal opinion.