Get the latest tech news

A brief history of threads and threading

From Switcher and MultiFinder, with Process Manager and Thread Manager in Classic Mac OS, to Pthreads, NSThreads, and Grand Central Dispatch.

Developed by Erich Ringewald and Phil Goldman, this brought cooperative multitasking, which was to become the mainstay of classic Mac OS. At its heart, GCD is a dispatcher managing queues of tasks, activating those that need most to be run, and leaving the less pressing to wait a bit longer. Over the last 41 years, macOS has gained thorough support for getting the best performance from multiple tasks, threads, and processes in chips that contain up to 32 CPU cores of two types – a far cry from that single 68000 processor.

Get the Android app