Foreground: [UNIX] Vt. To Bring A Task To The Top Of One's {stack} For Immediate Processing, And Hackers Often Use It In This Sense For Non-computer Tasks.

Foreground: [UNIX] Vt. To Bring A Task To The Top Of One's {stack} For Immediate Processing, And Hackers Often Use It In This Sense For Non-computer Tasks.

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:foreground: [UNIX] vt. To bring a task to the top of one's
{stack} for immediate processing, and hackers often use it in
this sense for non-computer tasks. "If your presentation is due
next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design
document."

Technically, on a time-sharing system, a task executing in
foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to
the user; oppose {background}. Nowadays this term is primarily
associated with {{UNIX}}, but it appears first to have been used
in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground
task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes
simultaneously reading the keyboard is a good way to {lose}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary

Related:

foreground vt. [Unix; common] To bring a task to the top of one's stack for immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks.
If your presentation is due next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design document....
background: n.,adj.,vt. To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever {foreground} matters are not claiming your undivided attentio
and `to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority....
background n.,adj.,vt. [common] To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever foreground matters are not claiming your undivided attentio
and `to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority....
ITS /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab.
Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `an ITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort....
ap: 1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program.
In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program....
mart terminal: n. 1. A terminal that has enough computing capability to render graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to.
The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term and the product it describes semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase `act like a smart terminal' used to describe the behavior of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote {server}'s storage, using said devices as displays....
batch: adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify
in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as `batch mode' switches....
EOF: /E-O-F/ [abbreviation, `End Of File'] n. 1. [techspeak] The {out-of-band} value returned by C's sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in other environments) when end of file has been reached.
This value is -1 under C libraries postdating V6 UNIX, but was originally 0....
WYSIAYG: /wiz'ee-ayg/ adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is *All* You Ge
an unhappy variant of {WYSIWYG}. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth...