History of concurrency in programming languages

• Concepts
  • Par-begin ... end (independent processes that share some memory, or run independenly)
  • fork and join (extension of C and supported by Unix) (independent processes that share some memory, or run independenly)
  • Co-routines (first proposed on paper in 1963, implemented in Simula, 1967): a task can suspend and resume another tasks (very low-level concept)
  • Semaphores (Dijkstra, 1965) - for controlled sharing of resources
  • Monitors - for controlled sharing of resources (a generalization of the semaphore)
  • message passing or rendezvous
• Programming languages
  • Concurrent Pascal (by Brinch Hansen, 1975) - implementing monitor concept
  • Modula-2 (by Wirth, 1978) - implementing monitor concept
  • ADA
  • Java - implementing monitor concept