Multitasking And User Interface in 1982

| 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...

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...

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.

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