Hi Ian,

There is a reason that what you are doing is not multitasking. The various tasks are all done in your program. Priorities are established by your program and your program never surrenders (or loses) control of the µ-controller.

If there were another program, an OS, deciding when your program could execute its next line of code, sharing the µ-controller with another program, that would be multitasking.

The difference is that your program would not be written to accomodate the second program, only to run in whatever time slots it was allotted.

Your point is still a valid one. By learning the techniques used in multitasking we can make our programs better able to do complicated tasks which involve multiple processes, but they still aren't, stricktly speaking, multitasking. Moreover, I would have a very difficult time conceiving of an application suitable for an 8051(2) which would warrant writing a separate program just to handle dividing processor cycles between various other programs.