Monitors and Concurrent Pascal: a personal history

Monitors and Concurrent Pascal: a personal history (P. Brinch Hansen)
Abstract
This is a personal history of the early development of the monitor concept and its implementation in the programming language Concurrent Pascal. The paper explains how monitors evolved from the ideas of Dahl, Dijkstra, Hoare, and the author (1971-73). At Caltech the author and his students developed and implemented Concurrent Pascal and used it to write several model operating systems (1974-75). A portable implementation of Concurrent Pascal was widely distributed and used for system design (1976-90). The monitor paradigm was also disseminated in survey papers and text books. The author ends the story by expressing his own mixed feelings about monitors and Concurrent Pascal.