🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <41fv6r$e7j@sundog.tiac.net>,
                        Jim Williams <williams@tiac.net> wrote:
          >abergman@minerva.cis.yale.edu (Aaron Bergman) wrote:

>> I do not believe that cooperative multitasking is a term invented
>> by marketer. I'd guess that if you looked in comp. sci. journals,
>> you'd see it before the IBM PC or the Mac even existed (someone
>> please correct me if I am wrong.)


> I don't think I still have any of my old textbooks -- early 70s.
> Anyone out there have an old text on building a timeshaing system?

> One thing I do remember well is the process ring we used at my
> first job.  The scheduler was three lines long (in assembly) and we
> certainly didn't call it a multitasking system.  (It was *real* efficient,
> but the only rule in using it was "know exactly what you are doing.")


Jim, the term "multi-tasking" was originally coined by IBM back in 1964.
The IBM terminology more clearly defined the abilty for more than one
task to be running asynchonously on single processor systems.  Up until
this point others had mistakenly called this multi-processing, which we
all know requires the use of multiple processors.

As I said, IBM correctly referred to this as multi-tasking.

BTW, there were many systems that ran quite effectively in this mode
back then.

That's about as far back as the history books go these days.  <g>



Bill Oconnor