Even without Doug Lea's extensions (though they did help making it more efficient and/or easier to understand), it's been possible to do this safely in Java fro

Even without Doug Lea's extensions (though they did help making it more efficient and/or easier to understand), it's been possible to do this safely in Java from v1.0 -- just synchronize and notify() or notifyAll() as needed. I think the chief problem is that the developer hadn't learned the basics of multithreaded programming yet, and didn't realize s/he needed to know them. That's an extremely harsh way to learn a little lesson, regardless.