 | | Although threaded programming styles have been around for some time now, it's only recently that they've been adopted by the mainstream of UNIX programmers (not to mention those erstwhile laborers in the vineyards of Windows NT and other operating systems). Software sages swear at the lunchroom table that transaction processing monitors and real-time embedded systems have been using thread-like abstractions for more than twenty years. In the mid-to-late eighties, the general operating system community embarked on several research efforts focused on threaded programming designs, as typified by the work of Tom Doeppner at Brown University and the Mach OS developers at Carnegie-Mellon. With the dawn of the nineties, threads became established in the various UNIX operating systems, such as USL's System V Release 4, Sun Solaris, and the Open Software Foundation's OSF/1. The clash of platform-specific threads programming libraries advanced the need of some portable, platform-independent threads interface. The IEEE has just this year met this need with the acceptance of the IEEE Standard for Information Technology Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) Part 1: System Application Programming Interface (API) Amendment 2: Threads Extension [C Language]—the Pthreads standard, for short. | |
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