What exactly is he talking about? I've read it, but got confused...

I've been console game developer for quite some time, and async stuff has always been around for us (but not so network oriented for the stuff I was doing - streaming sound, file I/O, DMA from one cpu to another, etc.)

But If I have to direct it, then precooking your data, so data once loaded only pointer mixup is needed was the basic to get streaming stuff in a game (Spiderman-2, Ultimate Spiderman, Spiderman 3).

Then comes stuff like ability to cancel async jobs, and off course start several at the same time, giving some more info to the underlying code - which should be done first. I can go on technical details in few pages.

What exactly is he talking about?