https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises is quite detailed and looks good. I'm sure MarkM & company knew of futures, so I should've mentioned them.

(I owe you mail too.)

Aha, Baker and Hewitt, 1977. I didn't realize Friedman had defined "promises" in 1976; I wonder if they're the same as E promises? (Which are almost precisely the same as ECMAScript promises.)

I was terribly remiss not to mention Dojo, a popular JS toolkit which got its promises from Twisted, which of course got them from E, though Twisted modified them a bit. I don't know how it slipped my mind.

I haven't read the Friedman/Wise paper. Most likely those were futures? They were doing FP work around then, like https://help.luddy.indiana.edu/techreports/TRNNN.cgi?trnum=T... (I seem to remember reading another paper of theirs which included racing suspensions till one of them completed, which would be more like futures than the streams of this paper. But if so I'm forgetting where.)

I get the impression E promises had a nicer design than JS's for handling errors -- but that's also a vague memory and I never really learned JS's.