[eaurouge]

> The following innovation that made it usable, by making it less bug-prone, was called a "multitasking operating system". The so-called "OS" allowed you to write simple sequential code, but used the computer efficiently by switching back and forth between multiple tasks as their respective I/Os completed. We're talking about the introduction of the Univac 1103A in 01953, 72 years ago, and the following 20 years of innovations, including things like Dijkstra's THE operating system. That is, asynchronous I/O is 20 years older than the Unix system call interface this article speculates it should replace.

That's just a scheduler though, and not necessarily an actor-oriented one. Multitasking doesn't imply communication between tasks, certainly not actor-oriented bidirectional message passing.

[kragen]

Yes, I agree. Something similar is why I don't think it's accurate to describe this article as being about actors: it's not about schedulers, but it's about asynchronous I/O, which is equally well not the same thing as actors, though scheduling and asynchronous I/O both have very interesting relationships with actors, which the article unfortunately does not go beyond vaguely gesturing at.

[mpweiher]

Sorry, but you are first changing "what the article is about" to something that the article is not, in fact, about, and then criticizing this thing that you just made up.

Not helpful.