I remember old Mac OS 9. If you started a print job, and held down the mouse holding down a click, the printer would just stop. The entire system wasn't properly multi-threaded.
That’s something that I remember people in my circle joking about at the time, but in retrospect maybe the joke was on us. User input should always be absolute top priority, and if that means something else has to stop then so be it.
To your point, I also remember working with early windows systems and when the network went down for a moment, the mouse and screen would freeze. Given the two options, Most would probably take the Mac.
