Ada was designed from the beginning with parallel processing applications in mind. Its tasking mechanism is a coherent response to the language issues involved in parallel processing, and carefully balances the often conflicting goals of high-level language features on the one hand and efficient implementation on the other. The purpose of this discussion is to place the design of Ada's parallel processing in its proper historical and technical context. In the process we will show how Ada itself has clarified some issues and thus established trends in language design.