I don’t know if concurrency is a science, but it is a field of computer science. What I call concurrency has gone by many names, including parallel computing, concurrent programming, and multiprogramming. I regard distributed computing to be part of the more general topic of concurrency. I also use the name algorithm for what were once usually called programs and were generally written in pseudo-code. [...]

The omission that would have seemed most striking to someone reading this history in 1977 is the absence of any discussion of programming languages. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most papers considered to be about concurrency were about language constructs for concurrent programs. A problem such as mutual exclusion was considered to be solved by introducing a language construct that made its solution trivial. This article is not about concurrent programming; it is about concurrent algorithms and their underlying principles.