

Multitasking And User Interface in 1982 - marcog1
http://www.ispyce.com/2011/04/video-explains-multitasking-and-user.html

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humbledrone
| _Before 1982, one can only do one thing at a time on any computer._

This might be true from a GUI perspective, but people have been able to do
multiple things on computers since the late 1950's.

In fact, the alleged inventor of time sharing systems, John McCarthy, was
already reminiscing about the history of time sharing just a year after the
Blit Terminal was invented:

[http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/times...](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/timesharing.html)

~~~
greenyoda
It's not even true from a GUI perspective. The Alto workstation, developed at
Xerox PARC in 1973, was the first computer to use a GUI with a desktop
metaphor and a mouse: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto>

Xerox's GUI later influenced Apple's Lisa machine (development started in
1978), which was a precursor to the Macintosh.

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michaelpinto
I hated it as a platform back in the day but the Amiga did multitasking with a
GUI environment back in the late 80s as I recall. Although i really hated
those rectangular pixels with a passion...

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thought_alarm
I presume that this 68000 machine was just a terminal that connected to a Unix
mainframe via serial connection. In other words, it's just equivalent to an X
window server.

It's interesting. Even way back in 1982 when you ask the question "how can we
use a GUI to make Unix better" the solution you come up with is essentially
X11.

~~~
watmough
In fact, the SUN-1 was 68000-based with a custom MMU.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1>

Though, I'd likely agree that UNIX probably wasn't that useful on these 680x0
workstations until the SUN 3/50, 68020 1 Meg RAM.

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whyenot
MP/M allowed you to do this on a microcomputer (like an Altos 8000) in 1979.
It was text-based, but it worked quite well.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M>

