My Amiga multitasked fine and I bought it in 1989. They could be had at least a couple of years before that. It worked really well. Still does actually, considering the small amounts of RAM these machines had. (I got my machine with one megabyte of RAM.)

I agree, though, that to belittle multitasking is stupid. I like my iPhone a lot but the lack of multitasking is a definite annoyance, especially when my budget Nokia E63 can do it.