foreground : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

English Dictionary: foreground	by the DICT Development Group
4 results for foreground
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
foreground n the part of a scene that is near the viewer (computer science) a window for an active application v move into the foreground to make more visible or prominent; "The introduction highlighted the speaker's distinguished career in linguistics" Synonym(s): foreground, highlight, spotlight, play up Antonym(s): background, downplay, play down
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Foreground \Fore"ground`\, n. On a painting, and sometimes in a bas-relief, mosaic picture, or the like, that part of the scene represented, which is nearest to the spectator, and therefore occupies the lowest part of the work of art itself. Cf. {Distance}, n., 6.
From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]:
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." 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}.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
foreground (Unix) On a {time-sharing} system, a task executing in foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to the user in contrast to one running in the {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 confusing. [{Jargon File}] (1994-10-24)