This thesis is a proposed solution to the problem of including an effective interrupt mechanism in the set of concurrent- processing primitives of a block-structured programming language or system. The proposed solution is presented in the form of a programming language definition and model. The language is called TRIPLE.

A system generation utility has been developed to assist students in producing IBM PC-based multitasking applications targeted for the small operating system (SOS) developed by Jerry E. Sayers. Our aim is to augment SOS by enabling a student to interactively tailor the characteristics of the operating system to meet the requirements of a particular application. The system allows the user to adjust factors such as: initial state, priority, and scheduling method of concurrently executed tasks, and. also, use of system resources. A custom operating system is produced by invoking a MAKE utility to bind SOS with application-specific code, in addition to intermediate source code created during the system generation process. Testing of the system included implementing an application that adds column vectors in a 5 x 5000 matrix concurrently. Further testing involves using the system generation utility along with SOS as part of an undergraduate operating systems class at East Tennessee State University.