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Multitasking And User Interface in 1982
- humbledrone 16y ago| 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/timesharing.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/times...
- greenyoda 16y agoIt'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 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.
- michaelpinto 16y agoI 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...
- thought_alarm 16y agoI 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 16y agoIn fact, the SUN-1 was 68000-based with a custom MMU. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 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.
- whyenot 16y agoMP/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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M