When I said that the OS executes the processes in time slots, I simplified how this really happens. Every process has one or more threads, and threads are executed. A thread is the smallest execution managed by an external scheduler. Older OSes did not have the notion of a thread and were executing processes. As a matter of fact, the first thread implementations were simply duplicates of processes that were sharing the memory.
You may hear the term lightweight process if you read something old. It means a thread.
The important thing is that the threads do not have their own memory. They use the memory of the process. In other words, the threads that run in the same process have indistinguishable access to the same memory segment.
The possibility of implementing parallel algorithms that make use of the multiple cores in a machine extremely powerful, but, at the same time...
