“I learned enough about the processor to realize I could use some of those spare cycles,” he recounted. “In effect I could kidnap the processor to do some arithmetic for the disk controller. I wouldn’t have to put so many gates into the disk controller”—saving another few thousand dollars in hardware—” if I could periodically borrow the processor to compute some of the things I needed to compute.” McCreight’s realization was their first embrace of the concept of “multitasking”—giving the processor numerous jobs to juggle at once. Implemented on this modest scale in MAXC, it was destined to pay
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