[radomir_cernoch]

From my freshman years around 2005, I vaguely remember that multi-thread GUI apps were:

- a way to avoid blocking the UI,

- tool to gain some perf. on new fancy multi-core processors,

- making the code much harder to read and debug, which often makes them a victim in a cost-benefit analysis.

[varjag]

Point is the programming paradigm of POSIX threads or multitasking wasn't a new concept then and likewise been in the curriculum for a while. Multi-core only brought a new level of performance to it.

There were in fact attempts for new concurrency paradigms (like Software Transactional Memory) which however led nowhere outside academia.