Chapter 1 Concurrent Parallel Processes

The nature of time in skilled, purposive behavior is determined by concurrency and parallelism. Time is not an independent variable and the chapter discusses how its structure is linked to message - passing. Attempts to formalize concurrency and parallelism are distributed in the history of Computer Science. This chapter reviews the evolution of some concepts - processes, semaphores, monitors etc. - with particular regard to their motivations and limitations.