| <i>Before 1982, one can only do one thing at a time on any computer.</i><p>This might be true from a GUI perspective, but people have been able to do multiple things on computers since the late 1950's.<p>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:<p><a href="http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/timesharing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/times...</a>
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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M</a>