note rinceWind <p>You mention VMS. Surely you've heard of <code>lib$spawn()</code>, not to mention the DCL command <code>spawn</code>, which is the natural way of creating a subprocess to do something different from the parent (as distinct from launching a detached process, which is roughly the equivalent of a nohup). The posix layer implements <code>fork</code>, but this is not the native VMS way of doing or thinking about things.</p> <p>Digital had a lot to do with the invention of threads. PThreads are a derivative of DecThreads, and VMS was one of the platforms on which they were originally targetted. The reason for this was that there is a substantial overhead in process creation - spawns were expensive, and threads provided a convenient way of multitasking inside a process's address space.</p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-144850"> <p><small>--<br /><br />Oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?<br /> My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree.<br /> Your powers of persuasion will set them all free,<br /> So oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ? <br /> <em>(Missquoting Janis Joplin)</em></small></p> </div></div> 594605 594689