GUIs are for discovery, CLIs are for power via composability, voice/NLP assistants are for convenience.
Was it? Even if you discard stuff like tmux as already a GUI, you can still send whatever is running at the moment to the background with CTRL-Z and typing "bg" on any modern Unix system. "jobs" will then list all your processes, and "fg <ID>" will bring it to the foreground. I am sure this functionality predates most modern GUIs.
You may be thinking of DOS, which yes had almost no multitasking ability available.
However there were multiple timesharing operating systems that existed before the PC and GUIs, Unix being the most famous and still around.
Multitasking is quite possible on a Linux console for example. It has 5 or more consoles, each handling different users, each being able to be split via screen/tmux. Each shell can run jobs in the background as well.