Conceptualizing Threading

[JonathanB]

I have a multi-access problem that I'm pretty sure needs to be solved
with threading, but I'm not sure how to do it. This will be my first
foray into threading, so I'm a little confused by all of the new
landscape. So, I'm going to lay out the problem I'm facing and if
someone could point me towards a good example of what I need to do,
that would be great. I read THE tutorial, and while it made since to
me in an esoteric sense, I'm not sure how to implement it.

I have a program which will be logging who took what orders. These
orders need to have sequential order numbers. SR001001, SR001002,
SR001003, etc. Problem is I'm not sure how many people will be
accessing this program at the same time. I thought about separating
the order number into its own file and the having a function open it,
read it, increment it, write it, and close it really quick to limit
the chance of two people pulling the same number. Then I heard found
threading.

So this sounds like a consumer/producer problem, right? So I think I
need to use a Queue to crank out quote numbers and have the users
connect to the queue to get their number. Does that mean I'm looking
at two separate programs, a server and a client? Where do I separate
the programs? I was just about to give up and have quote number
assignment be manual (with error checking), but I thought I should
check here first and see if someone could help me wrap my brain around
this problem. You'll never learn if you never try, right?