From reading the posts in this thread it appears to me that various people are understanding the term multi-tasking to mean different things. Some of you are seeing that the original poster to ths thread was meaning literally that he wants the 8051 to achieve more than one function at a time. Others are taking the term to mean the use of an RTOS (Real Time Operating System).

It is clear that the general view seems to be that 8051's are not really suited to the use of a full fledged RTOS. I for one would tend to agree with that.

However there are probably few real world 8051 processor applications that are not actually getting more than one function done during the passage of time. How to achieve this structure in code is the whole art of programming an embedded application!!

It is possible to achieve concurrent functionality on an 8051 processor with or without interrupts. This is an important concept to understand and has a lot to do with learning how to structure the code to achieve this. On the other hand interrupts can be used. Interrupts permit several advantages to the structure of the program:

- More predictable repetition of certain functions and/or events.

- Quicker reaction to changes of hardware state changes.

- Permitting the design of scheduled activities that relieves the main program thread from having to worry about counting every program cycle.

The ability to produce designs with these characteristics is of course the experience that comes from working ones way from being a beginner novice to one that has made a number of successful implementations.

And as a last comment let me add that there are many different schemes used by programmers to achieve functioinal concurrency. Probably as many schemes as there are programmers that have made them!!

Hope this helps.
Michael Karas