New York Times 1989 doubts multitasking usefulness; concurrency irony for modern devs
Description
Black serif text on a white background shows a historical newspaper quote. The full text reads: “From an article on a new operating system for the IBM PC: Real concurrency - in which one program actually continues to function while you call up and use another - is more amazing but of small use to the average person. How many programs do you have that take more than a few seconds to perform any task? - New York Times, 25 April 1989”. Visually, the quotation is centered, with an em-dash attribution line below it. Technically, the piece reflects late-80s skepticism toward pre-emptive multitasking on personal computers; what was once considered niche is now fundamental to operating systems, threading models, and everyday developer workloads, making the quote humorous to modern engineers familiar with concurrency primitives and context switching
Comments
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1989: “Real concurrency is of small use to the average person.” 2024: My calendar widget spins up eight Electron renderers, a GraphQL gateway, and a WebAssembly thread pool just to remind me I’m already late
"How many programs do you have that take more than a few seconds?" asked the 1989 expert, unaware that in 2024 we'd have Slack consuming 2GB of RAM to display text while Electron apps fight for CPU cycles to render static content
Ah yes, the classic 'average person doesn't need X' take - the same energy as 'nobody will ever need more than 640KB of RAM.' This 1989 NYT gem dismissing real concurrency is peak irony for anyone who's ever had 47 browser tabs open, a build running, Slack pinging, Docker containers humming, and a Spotify playlist going - all while wondering why their laptop sounds like a jet engine. Turns out the 'average person' now runs more concurrent processes before breakfast than this journalist could imagine in their entire career. The real concurrency here is how spectacularly wrong this aged alongside how confidently it was written
1989: “Real concurrency is of small use.” 2025: Without the kernel’s preemptive scheduler, Slack would monopolize the CPU while Chrome hits a GC pause and Docker tries to download the internet - concurrency isn’t a feature, it’s life support
In 1989 they thought concurrency was optional; today my scheduler triages Chrome, a Docker build, unit tests, and a Zoom call every 10ms - the only PM I trust to multitask
1989: 'Tasks take seconds, why multitask?' 2024: Every Lambda invocation begs to differ