Many, many, many years ago, my employer needed me to write some code to read 8 COM ports in OS/2. Then based on that, do some operations. So, me, being brand

Many, many, many years ago, my employer needed me to write some code to read 8 COM ports in OS/2. Then based on that, do some operations. So, me, being brand new to OS/2, immediately wanted to try out the new multi-threading features. Without knowing anything about locks and spins or deadlocks or shared state, I plunged into it just using the OS/2 documentation and a programming book I bought. Keep in mind, this was a single CPU machine, probably an Intel 486dx or something like that. I spent the next couple of weeks debugging all sorts of things that should not have been happening. There were crashes, lock up, slow downs, missing variables, etc... that I couldn't resolve. After a while, I gave up and did what the OP did: just put everything in a loop and it solved everything.