4 ms·
In 1987, I was a student intern at NASA Langley in a group that researched parallel computing. They had a dialect of C called Concurrent C that ran on a very sp
by GlenTheMachine 4y ago
In 1987, I was a student intern at NASA Langley in a group that researched parallel computing. They had a dialect of C called Concurrent C that ran on a very specialized platform, the Encore Multimax, which IIRC had 16 Motorola 68000 CPUs. The language had special constructs for threading, synchronization, and message passing, which had to be supported by specialized bus protocols in hardware.
The point being, when K&R was written, threading was highly experimental, and it remained so for at least the next decade.
- sargstuff 4y agoUser level threads concept also doesn't really work with limited resources available for 60's/70's/80's machines. Especially when charged by the precise amount of time/space/resources used, ?? 60's/70's mainfram vs. pc at home vs. today's cloud computing ??
- 95014_refugee 4y agoThe Multimax was NS16k/NS32k-based. After the Gould acquisition they switched to the 88K, but never (AFAIK) built anything on the 68K family. Kind of a pity, really; nice hardware, but terrible luck with processor families.
- GlenTheMachine 4y agoYou are correct. I dug out my Multimax manual, and my version says it came with dual processor cards populated with NS32032 CPUs operating at 12.5 MHz.