Imagine all the software that would've been written, or made much nicer, earlier on had Unix devs not been forced to use synchronous I/O primitives. Synchronou

Imagine all the software that would've been written, or made much nicer, earlier on had Unix devs not been forced to use synchronous I/O primitives. Synchronous I/O may be simple, but it falls down hard at the "complex things should be possible" bit. And people have been doing async I/O for decades before they got handholding constructs like 'async' and 'await'. Programming the Amiga, for instance, was done entirely around async I/O to and from the custom chips. The CPU needn't do much at all to blow away the PC at many tasks; just initiate DMA transfers to Paula, Denise, and Agnus.