[pedasmith]

Hey, I get to tell m y own two 1990's era threads story.

First: in Windows 3.1, you got exactly one thread. My former company (BBN Software Products, home of the RS/1 statistical program) managed to get a version of RS/1 on Windows by splitting it into two pieces, each of which ran a single thread. On piece (RS/Client) was the UI; it talked to the "server" using TCP/IP (or a shared memory channel if the client and server were on the same machine)

Second: I also got to help port a networking program over to an SGI box. At the time, the SGI GCC-based compiler could either supports threads, or support exceptions, but not both. (And my "unsupported" I mean, "generated code that would crash even if no exception was ever actually generated"). I couldn't convince the company to keep the threads and dump the exceptions, so instead I had to convert the program to spawn new processes with shared memory (!) to emulate the threads.

TL/DR: actually programming with threads at the time was decidedly unsupported.

[projektfu]

True, but Windows NT 3.1 came with threads and used them throughout the kernel. They were supported by nonstandard functions in the Microsoft C runtime as well as through the windows API. Windows included its own structured exception handling facility that also worked with it.