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Typeahead has its roots in the age of typewriters. The IBM Selectric typewriter (also known as the IBM Golfball typewriter), first released in 1961, had a typeahead feature designed to smooth out typists' irregular fingerstrokes.
Achieving this requires maintaining a so-called "typeahead buffer" - a FIFO queue, for instance - whose role it is to store a limited amount of keyboard input until it is called for. Installing such a buffer can be done at both the hardware and the software levels; most modern operating systems, such as Unix, implement this using software, calling kernel interrupts.
In some network operations, one might attempt to dispatch information over a network, regardless whether the receiving program manages to keep up, using the recipient's typeahead functions. However, as this is far too reliant on the specifications of the computer with which one is communicating, it is not often used.