You’re projecting a ‘modern’ concept onto a bygone time. Applications could (and in unfortunate cases, would) monopolise the system and if they got themselves s

You’re projecting a ‘modern’ concept onto a bygone time. Applications could (and in unfortunate cases, would) monopolise the system and if they got themselves stuck in a loop they’d never relinquish control of system resources back to the operating system. Your system would freeze or you’d get a blue screen of death. You can call it wait/async if you really want, but it’s hugely misleading in the present context of the term. It was a more fragile system, not a more robust one.