Notes on the History of Fork and Join

The fork call allows a process (or running program) to create new processes. On multiprocessor systems, these processes can run concurrently in parallel. Since its birth 50 years ago, the fork has remained a central element of modern computing, both with regard to software development principles and, by extension, to hardware design, which increasingly accommodates parallelism in process execution. This article looks back at the birth of the fork system call to share, as remembered by its pioneers.