I seem to remember first seeing threads used to run Novell and OS/2 on the 80286. (they must of been invented long before that, but that was my initial "OMG!"

I seem to remember first seeing threads used to run Novell and OS/2 on the 80286. (they must of been invented long before that, but that was my initial "OMG!" exposure to them) But threads aren't just complicated, they are dangerous. E.g. - if somebody forgets and updates something in an instance variable in a Java servlet, rather than local variables, hilarity/calamity ensues. By the time you are using thread pools, vs "spawn at will", how much better off are you than using a pool of processes safely separated by explicit interprocess communication?