Multi-tasking...

I want to read a character input from the keyboard so I used..

getchar();

The problem is, I want to be able to continue on with my program if user does not enter any character from the keyboard. The solution I have in mind is to do multi-tasking, but I am not sure if 8051 supports it. Also, I know that in C++, there is a function called..

peek();

This will return out of its function if a key is not pressed. So I want to know if C has a function similar to this...

thanks
Tommy