Maurice Herlihy "We always said that parallel machines with more than one processor were going to be important someday, but nobody knew when it would happen." Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University

In 1993, Maurice Herlihy along with Eliot Moss of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst invented transactional memory in the paper: Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures.

Transactional memory is a promising technique designed to make the creation of reliable multithreaded programs easier. It does this by using a transactional model wherein complex operations can be performed concurrently, in isolation from each other, with those operations either completing ...