Microsoft vs Lindows

Note that neither manual explicitly discusses the concept of having multiple windows on the screen simultaneously, although the first paragraph in the newer manual suggests that when it proposes using the feature to "protect areas of the screen from being overwritten with new text." The earliest game program I wrote for the Apple ][ (in Integer BASIC), back in late 1977, took advantage of this feature to display multiple windows for different aspects of the game, and even used inverse-video space characters to create visible borders for the windows. The utility of multiple independent text windows was readily apparent to even a novice programmer. Since the Apple monitor would only keep track of one window and cursor location, it fell upon the application programmer to track multiple sets and swap the relevant values in and out of the zero page variables used by the monitor ($20-23 for window bounds, 24-25 for cursor location, and 28-29 for current line base address (or call VTAB at FC22 after switching)).

As anyone who used the Apple ][ extensively will tell you, many programs did use multiple windows, although only a few programs presented overlapping windows. Most were tiled, but at least a few allowed overlap in a limited manner. The most common form of overlap that I recall seeing in Apple II programs was the creation of a new window overlapping existing information in order to prompt the user for some input, akin to a "dialog box" in modern GUIs.