As a freshman CS student? Granted things were changing rapidly in the 90s, but this wasn't the case my freshman year a couple of years prior. I know that I was aware of the concept of threading by my sophomore or junior year, and by the time I graduated had encountered them first hand. I'm not sure we even covered multitasking (fork() and friends) at all in my freshman year, but of that I'm far less certain.

From my freshman years around 2005, I vaguely remember that multi-thread GUI apps were:

- a way to avoid blocking the UI,

- tool to gain some perf. on new fancy multi-core processors,

- making the code much harder to read and debug, which often makes them a victim in a cost-benefit analysis.

I learned about it in 1991.