You may want to have a look at the console I/O functions, in particular _kbhit(), _getch() and _getche(). To prevent your program from spinning at maximum speed, thereby unnecessarily eating up lots of CPU power, you may consider adding a Sleep() of some milliseconds to your loop.

Multithreading, of course, is possible in console apps, though uncommon, at least at beginner level. If you don't even know what it is, I woudn't suggest to seriously consider using it for now.