[rglullis]

You couldn't do it at the same time. It's nice to say "we could run a spreadsheet or listen to music", but it's almost like these were mutually exclusive. Winamp was light on resources, but if you went on to try a large-ish sheet on Excel, the music would skip, or the app would crash, or both.

[bombcar]

The main amazing draw to Linux in the early days was that you could renice mpg123 just enough to keep audio playing while using the computer for other things.

It could also burn a CD without freezing the system or producing a coaster.

[hansel_der]

true, early pc's were really bad at multitasking but i haven't had much problems since DMA and L2 caches were available.