Individual Progress and the Multibound

Abstract

In the early decades of computing, when the speed of electronic circuitry had outgrown that of mechanical peripheral devices by some orders of magnitude, the demand for “parallelism” became louder and louder, because it was becoming more and more urgent for economic reasons. And, indeed, the excessively expensive circuitry of the time could, instead of being idle while waiting for the input of a slow card reader, much more beneficially be deployed for serving other customers of the computer installation. The idea of several programs running “simultaneously” on a single installation had been born.