Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
3. Krantz discloses that OS/2 is multitasking (pages 58-59):
In a multitasking environment, an application does not have to
execute tasks one at a time or synchronously. Instead, the application
can have more than one task active at a time. It can have one task
reading the keyboard and another task reading data from the disk.
While data from the disk is still waiting to be read in, the application
can be using the processor to get input from the keyboard and do
whatever is needed. Because timing relationship between all the tasks
is not known at every point in time, the tasks are said to be executing
asynchronously.
4. OS/2 can multitask "sessions, processes, and threads" (page 59).
5. Krantz discloses: "The application that is currently receiving keyboard
input and displaying data on the screen is called the foreground session.
The rest of the programs in the OS/2 system are called background
sessions." (Page 59.)
6. Krantz discloses (page 63):
A process owns "units of execution." A unit of execution is
called a thread. It can be thought of as a series of program
instructions that are executed one after another. We can equate an
application in the DOS environment to a single thread of execution
because the entire program executes synchronously from beginning to
end. In the DOS environment, there can never be two sets of program
instructions being executed 'at the same time' or asynchronously. In
OS/2, all the sets of program instructions that execute independently
of one another (asynchronously) are called threads.
7. Krantz discloses (page 64):
When two threads are executing asynchronously to each other,
it means that each thread does not know what the other thread is
currently doing. For example, one thread of a process could be
reading from the keyboard and writing to the display and another
thread of the same process could be reading from a file and writing to
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